Month: April 2012

by Zack Beauchamp

An excellent piece by Yair Rosenberg over at Tablet debunks a pair of big ones. First, Obama has been significantly less harsh on Israel than…his GOP predecessors:

Reagan was not the only president willing to put daylight between the United States and Israel. His successor, George H.W. Bush, made waves at a 1990 news conference when he said, “My position is that the foreign policy of the United States says we do not believe there should be new settlements in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem.” It was a statement that could just as easily have been made by President Obama. But unlike Obama, Bush took this controversial position a step further, conditioning $10 billion of loan guarantees to Israel on a total cessation of settlement building. He later compromised and allowed the loans to go forward, but with deductions commensurate with Israel’s construction in the occupied territories.

Second, Netanyahu is significantly less right-wing Israeli than his Likud predecessors:

Despite pressure and eventually threats from President George H. W. Bush, [Yitzhak] Shamir doggedly continued settlement expansion and insisted that the United States finance such building with loan guarantees. Under Shamir, the Chicago Tribune noted, “The number of housing units under construction in the occupied territories reportedly more than quadrupled to 12,985 last year from 2,880 in 1990.” And for his perceived intransigence on peace initiatives, Shamir famously earned himself the nickname “Mr. No.”

It is hard see how the Netanyahu government could possibly be more extreme than these predecessors, none of which officially acknowledged the need for a Palestinian state, and all of which spurred far greater settlement growth. Netanyahu, by contrast, spearheaded a partial settlement freeze for 10 months, something Begin and Shamir categorically refused to do.

I don't agree with everything Rosenberg writes, but his piece is essential context.

by Maisie Allison

New research compares Japanese and American capacities for "wise reasoning" over time: 

Americans do get wiser with age. Their intergroup wisdom score averaged 45 at the age of 25 and 55 at 75. Their interpersonal score similarly climbed from 46 to 50. Japanese scores, by contrast, hardly varied with age. Both 25-year-olds and 75-year-olds had an average intergroup wisdom of 51. For interpersonal wisdom, it was 53 and 52. Taken at face value, these results suggest Japanese learn wisdom faster than Americans. One up, then, to the wizened Zen-masters. But they also suggest a paradox.

Generally, America is seen as an individualistic society, whereas Japan is quite collectivist. Yet Japanese have higher scores than Americans for the sort of interpersonal wisdom you might think would be useful in an individualistic society. Americans, by contrast—at least in the maturity of old age—have more intergroup wisdom than the purportedly collectivist Japanese. Perhaps, then, you need individual skills when society is collective, and social ones when it is individualistic. 

An earlier look at the aging brain here.

by Chris Bodenner

A sunnier approach to dealing with confinement than Henri's:

by Patrick Appel

Wilkinson explains how political identity dumbs us down:

Up until the weeks before I parted ways with Cato, I never felt any overt pressure to toe any sort of party line. But almost as soon as I left, I found that I was noticeably less reflexively defensive about anti-libertarian arguments. I found it easier to the see merit it in them! I feel sure that much of this has to do with the fact that at some level I had recognized that my livelihood depended on staying within the broad bounds of the libertarian reservation, and that this recognition had been exerting a subtle unconscious pressure on my thought.

Once I became an independent operator, much of that pressure lifted. And as soon as that pressure lifted, I began to feel much less attached to the libertarian label. And as that sense of attachment waned, I became even less reflexively defensive about anti-libertarian arguments. It became hard for me to avoid the conclusion that my political self-conception had been interfering with my ability to evaluate arguments objectively. I had been letting people on my team get away with bad arguments, and I had been failing to acknowledge the force of arguments against my team's tenets. The fact that everybody else does this, too, doesn't make me feel any better about my own sins against Truth.

Because humans are reward-seeking creatures, opinions that agree with our interests and preconceived notions are much easier to digest. While trawling for Dish-worthy content to link to, I've learned that emotional dismissals of difficult ideas are not to be trusted. Forcing yourself to read challenging content and grapple with it is the only way to shrink ideological blind-spots. 

by Zack Beauchamp

Micah Zenko points to Central America:

Victims of intentional homicide account for a staggering 75 percent of all violent deaths. The region suffering the brunt of lethal violence is Central America, which has an average rate of 29 victims per 100,000 people, followed by Southern Africa (27) and the Caribbean (22); in comparison, the homicide rate in the United States was 4.5. 

He sees the drug war as the principal cause of the violence:

The primary force behind the high homicide rates [in central America] is increasing transnational criminal activity, fueled by the region’s strategic location between the major drug producers in Latin America and the illicit drug markets in the United States. Moreover, Central American governments either lack the capability or the will to confront the many security and governance challenges posed by drug trafficking organizations. 

(Photo: Forensic experts work in the car where former chief of the Directorate for the Fight against Drug Trafficking and presidential candidate for the Christian Democracy party Alfredo Landaverde was shot dead in Tegucigalpa, Honduras on December 7, 2011. By Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images.)

by Patrick Appel

Eventually:

Sure, it would be a major development if [Obama] and his party were to officially endorse gay marriage this year. But look ahead to 2016, when the Democratic nomination will be open. It’s striking how many of the prospective candidates — Andrew Cuomo, Martin O’Malley, Deval Patrick, Sherrod Brown, Dan Malloy, Elizabeth Warren — are on-board with marriage equality. Their position is rapidly becoming the position that all aspiring national Democrats will be expected to take, and it’s virtually inconceivable that the ’16 platform won’t reflect this. 

 by Patrick Appel

Ezra Klein thinks Charles Blahous's cost estimate is laughable:

The graph above compares Blahous’s baseline to the “current law” baseline. That’s already stacking the deck: The current law baseline assumes the expiration of all the Bush tax cuts, it assumes the spending sequester will take effect, it assumes huge Medicare cuts that Congress will never permit, and much more. If we follow current law, we don’t really have a deficit problem. No one believes we will follow current law. If they did, they wouldn’t worry about deficits.

Blahous defends his calculations:

The historical evidence is overwhelming that Congressional behavior is heavily influenced by Social Security and Medicare solvency determinations. Specifically, Congress is much less likely to enact cost-containment measures in either program when projected insolvency is more distant. Supporters of the ACA have elsewhere made clear that they agree the ACA will extend the Medicare Trust Fund’s solvency, protect its spending authority, lessen the risk of near-term benefit reductions, and mitigate the urgency of further Medicare reforms. 

Blahous has a point here, even if his overall calculations are flawed. On the whole, I agree with Howard Gleckman that the eventual cost of Obamacare is highly uncertain. The CBO estimate may be better than Blahous's, but one look at the CBO's cost-projection track-record and its self-professed uncertainty should humble pundits of all stripes.

(Chart from the CRFB)

Ask Rubin Anything

[Re-posted from yesterday, with many more questions added by readers]

by Chris Bodenner

As one of the most prolific conservative writers in the blogosphere, Rubin needs no introduction to the regular Dish reader, but you can read about her background here. See what she's blogging about today here. You know the drill by now: Submit a question in the Urtak poll embedded above (ignore the "YES or NO question" aspect in the text field and simply enter any open-ended question). We have primed the poll with questions that you can vote on right away – click "Yes" if you are interested in seeing Jennifer answer the question or "No" if you don't particularly care. We will air the answers in daily segments soon.

by Maisie Allison

In "the real world," yes: 

Overall the most cohesive religious groups — such as Mormons and Jews — still outperform their religious counterparts both in educational achievement and income. …  Religious people also tend to live longer and suffer less disabilities with old age, as author [Charles] Murray notes. Researchers at Harvard, looking at dozens of countries over the past 40 years, demonstrated that religion reinforces the patterns of personal virtue, social trust and willingness to defer gratification long associated with business success. But perhaps the most important difference over time may be the impact of religion on family formation, with weighty fiscal implications. In virtually every part of the world, religious people tend to have more children than those who are unaffiliated. 

by Chris Bodenner

A blogger can relate: