February 2014 – Page 14

Trade Deals Are Tricky

Banyan has a primer on the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations:

Some analysts fear that the compulsion to get the deal done may result in a lowest-common-denominator agreement, whereby each country’s sacred cows are respected and the potential benefits (estimated at nearly $300 billion a year to global income) squandered in advance.

That risk may have increased following the biggest of the many setbacks TPP has suffered recently: it now seems highly unlikely that Barack Obama will persuade Congress to grant him “fast-track” authority (also called Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA), to negotiate trade agreements before the mid-term elections in November (if ever). Without fast-track, agreements can be unpicked line-by-line by Congress, and other TPP countries will be reluctant to sign up.

James Traub looks at the big picture:

The TPP is the Obama administration’s bid to shape an Asia more in America’s image than China’s — which is precisely why it’s the pivot of the Asia pivot.

The traditional objection to trade pacts — and the default position of all too many Democrats — is that they do more harm than good to American workers. But the public-interest critique of the TPP focuses much more on harms that the United States will allegedly be perpetrating upon citizens elsewhere (even though the political representatives of those citizens will have signed the deal). The fear it reflects is a fear of the globalization of U.S. principles. For groups like Public Citizen, one of the most vocal opponents of the pact, the TPP’s hidden agenda is advancing “corporate policy goals, rights and privileges.” The domestic debate over the TPP is thus very largely a debate over the merits of the American economic model.

Noam Scheiber criticizes the priorities of the administration:

What we do know, based on leaked text of negotiations, is that U.S. officials are hard at work on priorities other than U.S. jobs. Many of them look like the priorities of the financial sector, as well as big energy, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies. For example, [Trade Representative Michael] Froman’s team, like the U.S. trade reps that came before him, is pressing to make it harder for countries to restrict the flow of capital across their borders, regulations that helped insulate the likes of Malaysia and Chile from recent financial crises, but which are unpopular on Wall Street. The U.S. negotiators also favor provisions that would make it easier for companies to challenge a variety of financial, consumer, and environmental regulations in foreign countries, and which could help, say, European banks to chip away at Wall Street reform in this country.

Crystal Myth, Ctd

A reader writes:

While the number of methamphetamine addicts in the United States may be overstated, I’m not sure the panic over meth use is overblown because the process of cooking the drug is so incredibly dangerous. Meth production requires toxic and carcinogenic chemicals that contaminate the homes in which the drug is cooked. Repeated exposure to even trace amounts of these chemicals can cause chemical burns, respiratory problems, and even cancer, especially in children. And children are quite likely to be present at places where meth is being cooked – between 2000 and 2005, more than 15,000 children were removed from meth labs across the country.

In places like the Midwest, where most meth is cooked for personal use (rather than in big, Breaking Bad-style super labs), the drug is often synthesized using a “shake and bake” method, in which the ingredients are placed into a 2-liter soda bottle and agitated. If anything goes wrong in this process the bottle can explode and cause horrific burns. For example, according to the Missouri Foundation for Health (pdf), 30% of the burn units in Missouri are dedicated to treating uninsured people injured while cooking methamphetamine – despite the fact that only .3% of the population of Missouri is estimated to be using the drug at any particular time.

As long as the effects of meth production have such an negative impact on its users and on the environment, it will remain a health crisis, regardless of the actual number of addicts.

Update from a reader:

That “30% of the burn units in Missouri are dedicated to treating uninsured people injured while cooking methamphetamine” number is pretty shocking, but is highly misleading: (1) the 30% is of “burn unit beds”, not ‘burn units’ as a whole; (2) the statement was “regionally,” not “Missouri-wide”—which would imply in the St Louis metro, given the cited author’s roll at a St Louis-area sheriff’s department; (3) According to Ameriburn (pdf), there are 36 non-pediatric burn-unit beds in the St Louis region; (4) so, we’re talking about 10 beds.

The Biological Basis Of Metaphors

Tom Bartlett reports on a relatively new area of inquiry:

Research on embodied cognition – the idea, basically, that the body strongly influences the mind in multiple ways we’re not aware of (though not everyone agrees with that definition) – is a fairly new field, and in the last few years it has produced a number of head-scratching results. For instance, there’s the 2009 study that seems to show that people holding heavy clipboards are more likely to disagree with weak arguments than people holding light clipboards. Or the study, also published in 2009, that found that people gripping a warm cup of coffee judged others as having a “warm” personality.

Another study indicated that that people who like sweet foods are more likely to volunteer – or as Bartlett puts it, “They were metaphorically sweet people who loved actual sweets”:

That finding hits on one of the underlying ideas of embodied cognition – that is, that the metaphors we toss around are grounded in more concrete, physiological truths. Warm things make you physically and psychologically warmer. Cold things make you feel more alienated. Sweet things make you sweeter, and liking sweet things means you behave more sweetly.

Now there are plenty of people, including some psychologists, who are skeptical about some of those results. I wrote about the critics of John Bargh’s research – he did the coffee-mug experiment – in an article last year. And a study that purported to show that people were more generous after riding an “up” escalator was shot down by Uri Simonsohn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a dry-witted crusader against suspicious statistics. (The Dutch researcher who did the escalator study, Lawrence Sanna, later resigned.) But that doesn’t mean embodied cognition as a whole is wrong, of course.

“Professional courtesy” among police officers refers to the idea that cops should not arrest or ticket other cops for traffic violations. Balko explains how this custom leads to miscarriages of justice and invites serious corruption:

Police officers who fail to extend professional courtesy to fellow officers can face ridicule, shaming and other retaliation. It’s an extension of the “Blue Code of Silence,” the informal admonition that cops refrain from implicating other cops. Several years ago there was even a Web site called “Cops Writing Cops” which provided a forum for police officers to publicly shame fellow cops who had the audacity to ticket them. (The site has since been taken down.) A 2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer study revealed that off-duty cops put stickers in the windows of their private vehicles to identify themselves to their fellow officers. And then there are outfits like “LEO Pro Cards,” a business that prints up handy, wallet-sized cards that cops and their family members can flash to request professional courtesy from other officers. …

You’ll often see the tradition defended as just a small, insignificant gesture between professionals who share a tough job. But if anything, cops should be held to a higher standard than everyone else. They are after all given the considerable power to arrest, detain and kill. Once cops start letting other cops off for traffic offenses, you begin to instill in some police officers the idea that they’re less beholden to the law than the average citizen, not more. It isn’t difficult to see how that could set the stage for more consequential corruption.

The Negative Side Of Positive Thinking

Adam Alter explains:

According to a great deal of research, positive fantasies may lessen your chances of succeeding. In one experiment, the social psychologists Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer asked 83 German students to rate the extent to which they “experienced positive thoughts, images, or fantasies on the subject of transition into work life, graduating from university, looking for and finding a job.” Two years later, they approached the same students and asked about their post-college job experiences. Those who harbored positive fantasies put in fewer job applications, received fewer job offers, and ultimately earned lower salaries. The same was true in other contexts, too. Students who fantasized were less likely to ask their romantic crushes on a date and more likely to struggle academically. Hip-surgery patients also recovered more slowly when they dwelled on positive fantasies of walking without pain.

Heather Barry Kappes, a management professor at the London School of Economics, has published similar research with Oettingen. I asked Kappes why fantasies hamper progress, and she told me that they dull the will to succeed: “Imagining a positive outcome conveys the sense that you’re approaching your goals, which takes the edge off the need to achieve.”

I wonder if she’s analyzed a few neoconservatives along the way.

The Vanilla Icing Of Rap, Ctd

A reader writes:

I’m not saying the white boy you posted doesn’t have skills, but the alphabet rapping concept, including progressive acceleration, was done a long time ago by Blackalcious [see above]. I’m more okay with white boys having their place in hip hop if they bring their own perspective and style to the table, like The Streets for example.

Another points to a true original:

A white (as in, albino white), legally blind, Muslim rapper from the Midwest: Brother Ali. He’s been, at times, inspiring to those who are perceived as different (a song called Forrest Whittaker); at times controversial (Uncle Sam, Goddamn); and, always, pretty intelligent and insightful (Dorian, about confronting his physically abusive neighbor, and Travelers, about slavery, African plight, and cultural repercussions for acting so immorally then). He’s not for everyone, but he is very talented.

This freestyle by Brother Ali is pretty amazing:

Thoughts At Twilight

Roger Angell, age 93, pens a lovely essay about growing old:

A few notes about age is my aim here, but a little more about loss is inevitable. “Most of the people my age is dead. You could look it up” was the way Casey Stengel put it. He was seventy-five at the time, and contemporary social scientists might prefer Casey’s line delivered at eighty-five now, for accuracy, but the point remains. We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing—that pale-yellow Saks scarf—reappear unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation.

“Shadows Of History You Can Actually See”

Bill Bonner, the subject of the above film, keeps watch over millions of archival National Geographic images. Kathryn Carlson offers a glimpse into his life:

Bill works alone, in a cold windowless room in the basement of National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington. But even though he spends the days mostly by himself, he says he is kept company by the millions of people immortalized in the photographs. To him, they are his ancestors, and he treats each photo like it is the greatest treasure in the world. …

The respect that Bill shows each photograph is heartwarming. He firmly believes that each image holds a memory, and in many cases those memories have been buried alive by time. They are forgotten and unseen by the outside world, even though they hold great insights into its past.

(Hat tip: PetaPixel)

Comical Racism

Noah Berlatsky explores the controversy over the selection of Michael B. Jordan to play Johnny Storm in the new Fantastic Four movie, asking why this deviation from comic book canon – a black actor playing an originally white character – is such a problem when others are overlooked:

American racism holds that only certain racial differences matter. Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Irish—all those people are white and can play one another with nary an eyebrow raised. Nobody is worried about whether Sue Storm has exactly the mix of Irish, German, and French-Canadian ancestry as Kate Mara, who has been cast to play her. For that matter, no one would say a thing if the actors cast to play Sue and Johnny, sister and brother, came from different ethnic backgrounds and didn’t look much alike. It’s only when one is black and one is white that you need to start worrying about family logistics. (And yes, you can find folks doing that on Twitter as well—because getting turned into living fire by cosmic rays is an everyday thing, but adoption is weird.)

“Fans often seem to believe that if a character is changed from white to black, they will no longer be able to identify with that superhero” Aaron Kashtan, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech who teaches a course on transmedia storytelling, wrote in an email to me. Kashtan adds that this is an example of “unconscious or overt racism”—a point underlined by the fact that the barriers to identification are so clearly arbitrary. Certain different people—Jews, or Irish, or folks with a hide made of orange rock—can be points of identification. Others, especially African-Americans or anyone with dark skin, can’t. The issue here isn’t staying true to the original. The issue is racism.

Daniel D’Addario adds:

The sort of franchise fans whose tweets get quoted in industry stories after big casting decisions see themselves as incapable, apparently, of empathizing with anyone not of their race; in order for a character to be understandable on-screen, that character must be white. But fans will, of course, end up going to see the movie — if you like the “Fantastic Four” characters, you’re simply not going to skip it because you disagree with a casting choice — and will discover what nonwhite movie fans have known for years: There’s no impediment to understanding a character’s motivations and actions simply because he’s of a different race than yours.