Author: Patrick Appel

Interior Monologue Of The Day

by Patrick Appel

George Packer’s argument with himself over Syria is worth reading in full. It begins:

So it looks like we’re going to bomb Assad.

Good.

Really? Why good?

Did you see the videos of those kids? I heard that ten thousand people were gassed. Hundreds of them died. This time, we have to do something.

Yes, I saw the videos.

And you don’t want to pound the shit out of him?

I want to pound the shit out of him.

But you think we shouldn’t do anything.

I didn’t say that. But I want you to explain what we’re going to achieve by bombing.

Continued here.

Why Are College And Healthcare So Costly?

by Patrick Appel

Ezra Klein thinks it’s because, unlike other purchases, you can’t say “no” to either:

You might want a television, but you don’t actually need one. That gives you the upper hand. When push comes to shove, producers need to meet the demands of consumers.

But you can’t walk out on medical care for your spouse or education for your child. In the case of medical care, your spouse might die. In the case of college, you’re just throwing away your kid’s future (or so goes the conventional wisdom). Consequently, medical care and higher education are the two purchases that families will mortgage everything to make. They need to find a way to say “yes.” In these markets, when push comes to shove, consumers meet the demands of producers.

The result, in both cases, is similar: skyrocketing costs for a product of uncertain quality.

McArdle provides a different answer:

[H]ow do we explain health care and college cost inflation? Well, health care economist David Cutler once offered me the following observation: In health care, as in education, the output is very important, and impossible to measure accurately. Two 65-year-olds check into two hospitals with pneumonia; one lives, one dies. Was the difference in the medical care, or their constitutions, or the bacteria that infected them? There is a correct answer to that question, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what it was.

Similarly, two students go to different colleges; one flunks out, while the other gets a Rhodes Scholarship. Is one school better, or is one student? You can’t even answer these questions by aggregating data; better schools may attract better students. Even when you control for income and parental education, you’re left with what researchers call “omitted variable bias” — a better school may attract more motivated and education-oriented parents to enroll their kids there.

So on the one hand, we have two inelastic goods with a high perceived need; and on the other hand, you have no way to measure quality of output. The result is that we keep increasing the inputs: the expensive professors and doctors and research and facilities.

War With Syria Is Massively Unpopular

by Patrick Appel

Reuters found that only 9 percent of Americans support using force against Syria. Nate Cohn claims that “it’s far too early to draw conclusions about public opinion on a hypothetical strike on Syria”:

The public isn’t fully informed about Syria’s behavior, and the administration and its senate allies haven’t made the case for strikes. Given that well-regarded polls have shown that the use of chemical weapons could sway public opinion, it wouldn’t be wise to discount the possibility that a plurality or majority of Americans might ultimately support some sort of military operation.

But support for striking Syria compares badly to previous wars. Joshua Keating digs up polling on past conflicts:

47 percent of Americans supported the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011, which Talking Points Memo noted at the time was the “lowest level of support for an American military campaign in at least 30 years.” Seventy-six percent of American initially supported the Iraq War, and 90 percent supported U.S. action in Afghanistan in 2001.

On the eve of NATO military action in Kosovo in 1999, Gallup described public support as “tepid” at 46 percent. By contrast, 81 percent of Americans thought that George H.W. Bush was “doing the right thing” prior to the beginning of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. Fifty-three percent initially supported in the invasion of Grenada. Even at their worst points, support for the wars in Iraq and Vietnam hovered around 30 percent.

I recognize there’s always a Rally ‘Round the Flag Effect and the level of support for action in Syria could change once the cruise missiles start flying and Americans feel the need to support the military action out of patriotism, but the baseline here is still pretty dismal.

Even if support spikes after America launches its missiles, that support is unlikely to be particularly solid. Support for intervention in Libya fell from 47 percent at the beginning of the conflict to 39 percent a few months later. And that was before the Benghazi attack.

Are Chemical Weapons Cause For War?

by Patrick Appel

Fisher identifies the administration’s primary objective in Syria – discouraging the future use of chemical weapons:

The idea is that, when the next civilian or military leader locked in a difficult war looks back on what happened in Syria, that leader will be more likely to conclude that the use of chemical weapons isn’t worth the risk.

If the Obama administration follows through on strikes, it’s fine to argue that America’s aim should be to force Assad from power, as many surely will. And it’s fine to argue that cruise missile strikes will or will not be effective at changing Assad’s calculus on chemical weapons, or that of future military leaders. But we should at least be clear, before it gets lost in the inevitable, worthy debates, that the United States has set a specific goal with its response to what Kerry called Syria’s “undeniable” use of chemical weapons, and it’s not winning the war.

Judis sees this as a worthy goal:

I think a nation’s credibility is important, but alone it is not enough to justify an intervention. In this case, what’s at stake is America’s willingness to enforce an international norm that is of benefit to the entire world.

Nick Gillespie disagrees:

If you think the U.S. should intervene militarily in even more places than we have already in the past dozen years, then please don’t hide behind the false threat or unique evil of chemical weapons.

The Assad regime is every bit as evil and rotten as the Hussein regime was. Instead of drawing lines in the sand over WMDs and all that, plead your case on the grounds that superpowers should try to stop the slaughter of innocents. I think that case is ultimately difficult to prove (or rather, it’s difficult to explain how American intervention will not ultimately lead to more problems than it might solve). But don’t rely on unexamined premises that one sort of weapon underwrites a response more than carnage itself.

Walt makes related points:

Proponents of action argue that the U.S. must intervene to defend the norm against chemical weapons. Using nerve agents like sarin is illegal under international law, but they are not true “weapons of mass destruction.” Because they are hard to use in most battlefield situations, chemical weapons are usually less lethal than non-taboo weapons like high explosive. Ironically we would therefore be defending a norm against weapons that are less deadly than the bombs we would use if we intervene. This justification would also be more convincing if the U.S. government had not ignored international law whenever it got in the way of something Washington wanted to do.

What’s Obama’s Grand Strategic Vision?

by Patrick Appel

Stephen Walt complains that the Obama administration “never bothered to lay out a clear strategic framework that explains why they are acting as they are” with regards to the Arab Spring and other foreign policy issues:

The problem with this ad hoc approach to policy formation is it leaves the administration perennially buffeted by events and vulnerable to pressure from all those factions, interest groups, GOP politicians, and ambitious policy wonks who think they know what ought to be done. If you don’t explain what you are trying to do and why it makes sense, it is hard for anyone to get behind the policy or see the common thread behind each separate decision.

By failing to lay out a clear set of principles — which in this case means explaining to the American people the basic points that Friedman made and why it doesn’t make sense for the US to toss a lot of resources into these various struggles — Obama & Co. end up looking inconsistent, confused, and indecisive.

By the way, laying out a clear set of strategic principles wouldn’t force the country into a rigid political straightjacket. Sometimes broad goals have to adapt to particular circumstances, and foreign policymakers often have to accept what is possible rather than what is ideal. But if you don’t explain what your underlying objectives are, why those objectives are the right ones, and how your polices are on balance going to move us in the right direction, then you are giving your political opponents a free gift and your supporters little with which to defend you.

How Do We Save The Whales?

by Patrick Appel

Canned Whale

Evan Soltas suggests legalizing whaling:

Ben Minteer, Leah Gerber, Christopher Costello and Steven Gaines have called for a new and properly regulated market in whales. Set a sustainable worldwide quota, they say, and allow fishermen, scientists and conservationists alike to bid for catch rights. Then watch the system that saved other fish species set whaling right.

The idea outrages many environmentalists. Putting a price on whales, they argue, moves even further away from conservationist principles than the current ban, however ineffective. They’re wrong. “The arguments that whales should not be hunted, whatever their merits, have not been winning where it counts — that is, as measured by the size of the whale population,”says economist Timothy Taylor, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

(Image by Flickr user Kinchan1)

Drawing Up Safe Districts

by Patrick Appel

Bernstein explains why gerrymandering only has a small effect on the number of seats each party wins:

In order for a party to win the maximum number of seats in a state, it’s necessary to stick as many of the other party’s voters into a small number of very lopsided seats. As a result, the victim party “wastes” votes in those seats, since in first-past-the-post elections there’s no bonus for winning by a large margin. Meanwhile, in the rest of a state, the party tries to be “efficient” by winning with relatively small margins.

The problem? No incumbent wants to win by a relatively narrow margin, even if it’s good for the party.

After all, a district that gives Republicans a 5 percent head start can easily produce a Democratic win if it’s a good Democratic year overall. Or a district with a 5 percent edge in 2012 can drift to even or worse by 2020. Or—well, no incumbent wants to win by five percentage points, anyway; they want to have districts with 30 or 40 point margins so that they don’t have to worry at all about re-election.

In other words, because incumbents often think mainly about their own careers, many states produce bipartisan gerrymanders—maps with only lopsided districts that give incumbents from both parties easy re-elections.

Kerry Beats The War Drums

by Patrick Appel

Max Fisher calls Kerry’s Syria speech today a “war speech”:

It’s difficult to find a single sentence in Secretary of State John Kerry’s forceful and at points emotional press conference on Syria that did not sound like a direct case for imminent U.S. military action against Syria. It was, from the first paragraph to the 15th, a war speech.

That doesn’t mean that full-on war is coming; the Obama administration appears poised for a limited campaign of off-shore strikes, probably cruise missiles and possible air strikes. President Obama has long signaled that he has no interest in a full, open-ended or ground-based intervention and there’s no reason to believe his calculus has changed. But Kerry’s language and tone were unmistakable. He was making the case for, and signaling that the United States planned to pursue, military action against another country. As my colleagues Karen DeYoung and Anne Gearan wrote, “Kerry left little doubt that the decision for the United States is not whether to take military action, but when.”

You can watch the speech above or read the transcript here. Kerry’s speech hinges entirely on the moral depravity of chemical weapons and our alleged responsibility to enforce the taboo against them. Larison sees this as a bad reason to start a new war:

There is a broad, almost universally shared taboo against the use of chemical weapons. Attacking Syria doesn’t strengthen or reinforce that taboo.

Choosing not to bomb a country whose government has used these weapons does not signal approval of that use, and launching some cruise missiles at government forces in response to that use isn’t going to keep them from being used in the future. All that it does do is potentially invite Syrian retaliation against the U.S. and its clients and allies. At best, it is a reaction designed to show that the U.S. will “do something” while achieving nothing, and at worst it is the beginning of the slide towards escalation to a major war.

Earlier today, Fisher spelled out the cases for and against intervention in Syria. One of the arguments against military force:

Military intervention in a protracted foreign conflict can take on its own logic that makes escalation very difficult to stop. The Obama administration might have the intention of launching just one series of strikes and then backing off, but in practice that’s rarely what happens. Domestic politics, international pressure and short-term military thinking can all lead a very limited campaign to snowball into a more open-ended one. That’s particularly true if the goals of the initial strikes are vague or poorly defined.

Drum argues that half-measures against Assad are unlikely to succeed. Preventing him from using chemical weapons would require “committing ourselves to full-scale war against Assad”:

It’s possible that enforcing international norms against chemical attacks is important enough to make that worth it. But that’s the question we should be asking ourselves. A “punishment” air strike is a joke, little more than a symbol of helplessness to be laughed off as the nuisance it is. If we want to change Assad’s behavior, we’ll have to declare war against him.

The Deal The Feds Should Make On Marijuana

by Patrick Appel

Kleiman outlines it:

Washington and Colorado would like the feds to let their new commercial systems operate. And the feds would like Washington and Colorado to suppress production for out-of-state sale. When each of two parties has something the other wants, that’s the basis for a bargain.

And the Controlled Substances Act (Sec. 873, if you’re keeping score at home) orders the Attorney General to cooperate with state and local officials in enforcing the law, and authorizes him, “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” to enter into “contractual arrangements” with states and localities. The paper proposes that he use that authority to make formal deals with Colorado and Washington in which the Justice Department would agree to keep hands off state-licensed businesses in return for the states’ active help in suppressing interstate trade. That wouldn’t make the state-authorized activity legal, but it could formalize a program of targeted, selective enforcement that would give state licensees an effective safe harbor.

He later reports that in Colorado there “have been discussions involving state and federal officials, but no negotiations of the ‘If you do X and Y we’ll let your people alone’ variety”:

That seems to me like a big missed opportunity; had the federal government presented the two state governments with list of demands, as conditions of federal acquiescence with the new commercial cannabis-distribution systems, there would have been very strong incentives pushing state officials to meet those demands. Once Washington and Colorado have regulations in place and start issuing licenses, retro-fitting the terms of a bargain into that process gets much, much harder.

Not Supporting “Support Our Troops”

by Patrick Appel

Steven Salaita hates the phrase:

A nation that continuously publicizes appeals to “support our troops” is explicitly asking its citizens not to think. It is the ideal slogan for suppressing the practice of democracy, presented to us in the guise of democratic preservation. …

Who, for instance, are “the troops”? Do they include those safely on bases in Hawaii and Germany? Those guarding and torturing prisoners at Bagram and Guantánamo? The ones who murder people by remote control? The legions of mercenaries in Iraq? The ones I’ve seen many times in the Arab world acting like an Adam Sandler character? “The troops” traverse vast sociological, geographical, economic and ideological categories. It does neither military personnel nor their fans any good to romanticize them as a singular organism.

James Joyner has mixed feelings:

I’m generally annoyed by and uncomfortable with out-of-content appeals to patriotism. I don’t have “Support the Troops” ribbons on my car or wear a flag on my lapel and, unless it’s the 4th of July, find it odd to have the “Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America” performed at sporting events.

But “support our troops” can mean many things. While often used to demand reflexive support for our war effort, it can simply be a call to honor their sacrifices  regardless of one’s views of the war we’ve sent them to fight. For that matter, it can mean that we owe a great deal to those who have been gravely wounded, physically or psychologically, fighting those wars. In those contexts, I support “support our troops.”