Month: December 2009

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

As someone who has worked in drug use survey research, let me put the numbers regarding (30-day) marijuana and cigarette use into a bit more perspective. Yes, marijuana use was very high in the 70s, and has dropped since, but it actually goes in waves (as does cigarette use, but we'll get to that in a moment). Using the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey data (which is a fairly consistent national sample using the same questions over the past two decades and more), we can see that marijuana use in high school had a local peak in 1999 at almost 27%, about 7 percentage points higher than today, and has since declined (to about 20% in recent years, with about 2 percentage point margin of error). The real story is not marijuana use, but cigarette use, which also peaked in the late 90s at about 36% (a wave in the 1990s again), but has since shot down to about 20% as well, with the biggest drop coming between 2001 and 2003 (28.5% to 21.9%, both with about 2.5 percentage point margins of error). So it's really not about how much pot has or has not risen; in fact, marijuana has been declining. It's about how much cigarettes have fallen. And that's a big success story, because unlike marijuana, there are definite health impacts to cigarette use, particularly early cigarette use.

by Chris Bodenner

A friend just sent me this work of genius made back in June, and I can't believe the Dish missed it (probably because of all the Iranian protest coverage):

by Patrick Appel

William Easterly says that the Tiger Woods scandal explodes the "Halo Effect" myth in development. Drezner is unsold and points to and article (pdf) on entrepreneurship by William Baumol to make this point:

Not everything is a necessary condition for development.  But some things are VERY IMPORTANT necessary conditions.  Without them, a country's natural endowments get used in very, very perverse ways.  It is entirely possible to have an innovative society in a corrupt state, for example — but the question is, how does a corrupt public sector skew the incentives of entrepreneurs and inventors? 

by Patrick Appel

Frum celebrates the Medicare buy-in going down in flames. Ezra Klein saw the Medicare buy-in as a first step towards single-payer, but this post by Tyler Cowen also sprang to mind when the idea was being seriously considered:

If I were a progressive I would be wondering right now whether Medicare was a tactical mistake.  The passage of Medicare meant that most old people get government-provided health care coverage.  Yet the way to get things done in this country, politically, is to get old people behind them.  Further health care reform doesn't now seem to promise much to old people, except spending cuts on them.  Given their limited time horizons, old people don't so much value system-wide improvements, which invariably take some while to pay off.

If Medicare had not been passed, might this country have instituted universal health care coverage sometime in the 1970s?

The buy-in would have made this problem worse, no?

by Patrick Appel

Mark Blumenthal's latest column looks at what Americans want out of health care reform. An afterthought:

For all its messiness, the legislative negotiation and debate has narrowed to the two priorities that Americans, and especially those most uncertain about the propose legislation, rank highest: making sure affordable insurance is available and not adding to the budget deficit.  From the perspective of democratic representation, the system is working as it should.

by Patrick Appel

Andrew Exum reads Hizballah's new manifesto and the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2025 report one after the other:

If you look at Hizballah's flag, you'll note it says "The Islamic Resistance in Lebanon" at the bottom. Once upon a time, though, it read "The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon". I think they changed this because it made everyone so nervous. Well, everyone can sleep easy, because there is nothing revolutionary about this militia-cum-political party anymore. Hizballah is just as much a part of the calcified political landscape of the Middle East as Hosni Mubarak. This cliché-spewing manifesto — "American terrorism is the origin of all terrorism in the world", says the organization that popularized suicide bombings — only serves to confirm that. Maybe this manifesto was intended to appeal to Western leftists — until, presumably, those leftists remember Hizballah is a religious fundamentalist organization. But the effect is to make Hizballah seem stuck in 2003, unable to either confront the hard internal challenges facing the Middle East as a region and still reliant on a U.S. bogeyman to justify all its actions and rhetoric.

by Chris Bodenner

This fascinating footage of coconut-carrying octopus – the first invertebrate to be found using tools – is making the rounds:

by Conor Friedersdorf

The Democracy in America blog at The Economist:

There hasn't yet been a country in which the task of cultural formation and reproduction was so thoroughly delegated to the entertainment industry as today's America. In a media-centric economy, the wages of contrarianism are fat. As are the wages of bombast. If sober, responsible analysis pulled in viewers, PBS and C-SPAN would be the titans of American broadcasting. Instead we have Fox News and MSNBC.

Are the wages of contrarianism really so fat? Feast your eyes on the most popular magazines in America.  They aren't contrarian. Now look at the most popular television shows. You've got to scroll through a lot to find any nonfiction, and Oprah, 20/20 and Dateline NBC surely have their flaws, but they don't exactly resemble what you find on Twitter under the hash tag "Slate pitches." And while I'd defend the Slate as a first rate Web magazine that publishes lots of worthwhile writing, it isn't as though their content is attracting the most eyeballs on the Internet — most obviously, they're orders of magnitude smaller than AOL, Yahoo News, and the New York Times Online.

This isn't to say that there isn't any excessive bombast or contrarianism-gone-wild going on in the media. But I do think it is too simplistic to say that it exists because "sober, responsible analysis" doesn't pull in viewers. The fact is that it is difficult and expensive to produce material that is both enjoyable and substantive — or, for that matter, to produce films that are entertaining and have artistic merit. Producing bombast is comparatively cheap, and excessive contrarianism is often the puzzling complaint of a subset of America that a) reads Slate daily; b) imagines it is representative of American media; c) mocks one of the few publications they actually read regularly for certain of its articles, though the complaints are actually as often about headlines that don't even particularly track the article.

On a tangentially related subject, I see that a critic of mine at True/Slant is asserting that "when a pundit or political thinker betrays his ideological brethren – at least rhetorically – he is heralded as a 'brave truth teller' and enjoys riches and fame" — this in a post that cites Andrew, Kathleen Parker, Chris Buckley and myself as the beneficiaries of this supposed bounty.

Every time I hear this argument, which is a lot, I am struck by its utter disconnectedness from reality. If a young pundit wants riches and fame, the surest approach is to find a belief system with a lot of adherents, and to creatively repackage those beliefs in various ways that affirm what they already believe. Perhaps it is too much to expect outsiders to realize that is how things work in the ideologically funded world of political publications and DC think tanks, but is it too much to expect folks to look at the New York Times bestseller list, or to notice who appears on television, or to recognize that obscure writers like me have never even made close to a six-figure income, while various group loyalists earn 7 figures and up for their output, whether they are in politics like Rush Limbaugh, or religion like Rick Warren, or reaffirming some subset of consumer and cultural norms, like Martha Stewart?

It is also worth mentioning that Kathleen Parker was a very successful columnist and an often heterodox thinker long before she trashed Sarah Palin — since the True/Slant blogger read Kerry Howley's excellent profile, it is strange that he terms Ms. Parker's writing on the former Alaska governor a betrayal — and that Andrew Sullivan built his own audience of heterodox thinkers from the beginning: he didn't rise by being and then betraying conservatives, he rose by being his unclassifiable self all along.

Getting back to the Democracy in America post, it notes:

Clearly, the Washington Post prints opinion pieces by Sarah Palin in large measure because they attract attention. With plummeting revenues in almost every corner of the media business due to a crisis of overproduction, the imperative to attract attention is becoming irresistible. You attract attention through contrarianism and bombast.

But the problem with Ms. Palin's op-ed wasn't bombast or contrarianism. It was a dearth of qualifications to write the piece, and a lack of persuasive reasoning within it. What plagues public discourse in America is an audience that mostly wants its beliefs reinforced. That is a far bigger problem than bombast — if Fox News stayed bombastic but departed from what now passes for conservative orthodoxy its audience would flee. It is downright strange to cast contrarianism or ideological disloyalty as grave problems, given the ongoing trend toward cocooning.

by Andrew

Love you:

Two Weeks – Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.