Author: Andrew Sullivan

Mike Pearl points to it:

A study published on Sunday in Nature Climate Change gave us the news that climate change is bringing about a higher proportion of female sea turtles to males, thanks to a seemingly idiotic genetic quirk called temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), also found in a few other species. Essentially TSD gives the turtles a baseline temperature of 84.2 degrees, at which there are 50/50 odds of being male or female. Beyond a certain threshold of heat, too few males will exist [to] the sustain the population. …

The authors of the study found that in the short term, turtle numbers are actually going to increase. The study looked at one species: loggerheads, on the island chain of Cape Verde off Africa’s west coast, and modeled what’s going to happen to them during 150 years of irrevocable temperature increase. The good news is that the increasing number of female turtles—who do the risky work of carrying the eggs to the island of their birth and laying them in hidden nests—will increase the overall number of turtles for the next 30 years.

(Photo: A Loggerhead turtle hatchling begins its life-long sojourn in the Mediterranean Sea soon after it was freed by Israeli ecologists after being trapped in its 40 cm deep nest at a protected hatchery on Betzet beach, at first light near the northern Israel town of Nahariya on August 24, 2006 . By David Silverman/Getty Images)

Yesterday’s inauguration of India’s new prime minister Narendra Modi was marked by the surprising appearance of his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif. Isaac Chotiner isn’t sold on the theory that “someone like Modi, known for his nationalist views and aggressive posture, might find it easier to negotiate peace with Pakistan”:

Modi is surrounded by extreme hardliners; he has used Pakistan in the past to make alternately silly and demagogic remarks; and his constant nationalistic rhetoric is the type that often goes hand-in-hand with aggression on the world stage. As for the invitation to Sharif, it isn’t clear whether it was made because Modi genuinely wants peace and increased ties, or because he wanted to cause Sharif political difficulties. (Sharif’s decision to accept Modi’s invitation was controversial in Pakistan.) If there is another Pakistani-supported terrorist attack, such as the one on Bombay in 2008, Modi would likely respond very forcefully, as the previous government did not.

The mention of Pakistani aggression against India recalls the greatest barrier to peace, and it isn’t Modi. Pakistan’s powerful military has already halted Prime Minister Sharif’s moves toward establishing closer ties with India.

Bruce Riedel notes the challenges Sharif faces from Pakistan’s “deep state”:

Modi has pledged to seek better relations with Islamabad but only if it cracks down seriously on the deep state’s patronship of terror. He has significant potential economic carrots and sticks to use with Sharif, who knows Pakistan needs to dramatically improve trade with India if it is to get its own economy moving.

But Sharif is also very aware that the last time he was prime minister, he tried to get peace talks moving with India—only to be sabotaged by the deep state.  Early in 1999 Sharif invited then-Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee to Lahore to talk about reducing tensions. Less than six months later Sharif’s army chief, Pervez Musharraf, broke the cease-fire in Kashmir and started a small war around the town of Kargil.  The small war threatened to escalate into a full-scale catastrophe with nuclear weapons until Sharif bravely came to Washington on July 4th and was persuaded by President Bill Clinton to unilaterally pull back the Pakistani army behind the cease-fire line. By the end of 1999 Sharif had been overthrown in a coup by Musharraf. The deep state had triumphed.

Pointing to an attack on the Indian consulate in Herat, Afghanistan, last Friday, Paul Staniland weighs Modi’s “limited” options for dealing with Pakistani terrorism:

Modi can try to reach out to Pakistani civilian leaders in hopes of splitting them from a skeptical military, but this has been India’s strategy in the past with little success. “Spoilers” like the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba have repeatedly undermined India-Pakistan rapprochement. Pakistan’s powerful army seems to be in no mood for a deal with New Delhi, viewing India as a rising power now run by a Hindu chauvinist, and regularly alleging that India is supporting militant groups along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Simmering civil-military tensions over media freedom and policy toward the TTP have limited Sharif’s ability to deliver on policy change.

India cannot credibly threaten military retaliation. As Vipin Narang has shown, Pakistan’s mixture of conventional and nuclear forces is intended to rapidly escalate any conflict, making Indian ground or even air strikes extremely risky. … In the face of these constraints, we are likely to see a two-pronged Indian strategy. First, outreach to Pakistan’s civilians will continue. Modi has a commanding majority and hard-liner credibility that limit his vulnerability to domestic criticism. Sharif is believed to be interested in improving ties with India, and there is always a chance that he and Modi can craft some forward progress. Second, India is likely to expand its overseas intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

General Prayuth Chan-Ocha, the leader of last week’s coup d’etat in Thailand, announced yesterday that the coup had received the blessing of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Ritika Singh considers the “convoluted” relationship between the monarch and the military a big part of the country’s problem:

The ailing King, who enjoys prestige in Thailand that is hard for Westerners to understand, has been largely absent from this recent political crisis. There has been speculation about his role behind the scenes, but his lack of open involvement—unlike in previous crises—could actually have exacerbated this situation. The monarchy and the military have been intricately tied together for decades, and the King has supported many of the coups that have plagued Thailand. At the end of the day, what the King wants, goes. Thais who believe that the King’s playing puppet master to the country is preferable to the machinations of inept politicians, again, do not see the long-term erosion of democratic institutions that this induces.

The Thai military’s adventurism in its country’s politics—and the popular support for it—demonstrates how complicated the problem of extricating the military from politics still is in many developing countries. Thailand is not alone here. It is one of the biggest hurdles to a democratic transition in Pakistan, Egypt, and other countries as well. If the role of the military and people’s attitudes toward it don’t change, the endless cycle of coups won’t change either.

Recalibrating his prognosis for Thailand, Jay Ulfelder expects that the “risk of yet another coup will remain elevated for several years.” Furthermore:

Thailand’s risk of state-led mass killing has nearly tripled… but remains modest.

The risk and occurrence of coups and the character of a country’s national political regime feature prominently in the multimodel ensemble we’re using in our atrocities early-warning project to assess risks of onsets of state-led mass killing. When I recently updated those assessments using data from year-end 2013—coming soon to a blog near you!—Thailand remained toward the bottom of the global distribution: 100th of 162 countries, with a predicted probability of just 0.3%. If I alter the inputs to that ensemble to capture the occurrence of this week’s coup and its effect on Thailand’s regime type, the predicted probability jumps to about 0.8%.

That’s a big change in relative risk, but it’s not enough of a change in absolute risk to push the country into the end of the global distribution where the vast majority of these events occur.

Uri Friedman sees Thailand as an example of a new trend, in which the middle class chooses stability through military rule over democracy with less certain outcomes:

[T]he Thai military’s express goal in seizing power this week was to restore political stability and economic growth. And the move followed massive anti-government protests, just like the coup in Egypt that overthrew Mohammed Morsi last year. In both Egypt and Thailand, the protest movements that prompted military intervention enjoyed support from middle- and upper-class citizens. These aren’t isolated cases. Joshua Kurlantzick, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has argued that around the world, a growing middle class “is choosing stability over all else,” and embracing “the military as a bulwark against popular democracy.”

The idea of a popular, “middle-class military coup” isn’t necessarily new—it has echoes in Latin America in the 1960s and 70s—but it’s making a comeback in the few coups we’re still seeing today, with troubling implications for democracy in the countries where they take place.

Jessica Schulberg contemplates the US response:

That the U.S. is now legally bound to do something that would be contrary to its interests—and not necessarily beneficial to the Thai people—raises doubts about the utility of Section 508 of the Foreign Assistance Act [which requires cutting aid to countries that experience military coups]. “Laws that don’t have escape clauses, like national interest waivers or national security waivers, almost never work,” said a former State Department official. “All that happens is that the government will either deny the obvious—say it’s not a coup—or if the government allows itself to be bound by it, it is deprived of the necessary flexibility in coping with each unique circumstance.”

(Photo: Roses given by coup-supporters decorate a military vehicle as Thai army soldiers stand guard at the Victory Monument in Bangkok on May 27, 2014. By Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images)

Olga Khazan explains how Germany’s healthcare system has kept drug costs in check by refusing to pay extra for new medicines that don’t actually work any better than the old ones:

Almost every German belongs to one of some 160 nonprofit “sickness funds,” or nonprofit insurance collectives. The sickness funds cover both medical visits and prescription drugs. Drug prices there are already lower than in the U.S. because sickness funds negotiate with both physician groups and drug manufacturers to set costs of all treatments across the board. In the U.S., Medicare isn’t even allowed to negotiate lower drug prices. …

Enter 2010′s Pharmaceutical Market Restructuring Act, or Arzneimittelmarkt-Neuordnungsgesetz, abbreviated in German as AMNOG. As in “AMNOGonna pay drug companies for new meds that are more expensive but not any better than the old ones.”

Under AMNOG, as soon as a new drug enters the market, manufacturers must submit a series of studies that prove it heals patients better than whatever was previously available. If the new drugs don’t seem any better than their predecessors, the sickness funds will only pay for the price of the earlier version. Patients can still buy the newer medicine, but it’s up to them to make up the price difference out of pocket.

Last Friday, Chris Giles alleged on the pages of the Financial Times that Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century contains major data errors that undermine his entire theory. Jordan Weissmann outlines Giles’ accusations:

First, it says Piketty has covered up a giant gap in America’s historical records on wealth concentration. “There is simply no data between 1870 and 1960,” the newspaper states. “Yet, Prof. Piketty chooses to derive a trend.” This charge is neutered a bit by the fact that Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez recently released a detailed analysis of U.S. wealth inequality dating back to 1913 that shows an even more dramatic increase than what Piketty found. But Piketty will nonetheless need to spell out how he reached his own conclusions in a bit more detail.

The much more important point of contention is Great Britain. The FT argues that Piketty’s graphs simply “do not match” his underlying data on the UK, and that official estimates show no significant increase in the country’s concentration of wealth since the 1970s. Once Britain’s corrected data is included in the picture, the FT argues, the evidence that wealth inequality is growing across Europe disappears.

“But,” Tim Fernholz interjects, “it’s not clear that Piketty’s analysis is entirely doomed”:

Giles says that he has refuted two of Piketty’s notions: That wealth inequality has begun to increase in the last 30 years, and that the US has a more unequal distribution than Europe. But Giles’ final chart, comparing US and European inequality, is ambiguous on this score. The chart is a mix of different datasets, some of which show wealth inequality appearing to increase—albeit so slightly that it might be a statistical error—after 1980. And some show that US inequality is higher than in Europe—even without including the Saez-Zucman data [here], where the effect is more pronounced …

By that reading, Piketty’s ideas could still be plausible, even though problems need to be rectified and further work is needed. No doubt many eager economics grad students are licking their chops.

Krugman is incredulous over Giles’ contention that there is “no obvious upward trend” in inequality:

I don’t know the European evidence too well, but the notion of stable wealth concentration in the United States is at odds with many sources of evidence. Take, for example, the landmark CBO study on the distribution of income; it shows the distribution of income by type, and capital income has become much more concentrated over time:

It’s just not plausible that this increase in the concentration of income from capital doesn’t reflect a more or less comparable increase in the concentration of capital itself. Beyond that, we have, as Piketty stresses, evidence from Forbes-type surveys, which show soaring wealth at the very top. And we have other estimates of wealth concentration, like Saez-Zucman, that use completely different methods but point to the same conclusion.

“Even if you believe that Giles’s findings dramatically change Piketty’s results,” Danny Vinik argues, “they have little bearing on his economic theory”:

Giles makes a passing comparison to economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff (R&R), who drove a significant part of Republican austerity agenda, but saw their findings disproven in 2013. Liberals celebrated when Thomas Herndon, a graduate student from UMass Amherst, discovered a spreadsheet error in R&R’s results that invalidated their main finding. But unlike Piketty, Reinhart and Rogoff largely had no economic theory to ground their argument that national debt crises occur when a country’s debt level surpasses 90 percent of GDP. Once their data fell apart, their theory had no legs to stand on. On the other hand, Piketty fits data to this theory, but does not depend on it. Piketty’s theory—right or wrong—is largely unaffected by these results.

Ryan Avent makes a similar point:

First, the book rests on much more than wealth-inequality figures. Second, the differences in the wealth-inequality figures are, with the exception of Britain, too minor to alter the picture. And third, as Mr Piketty notes in his response, Chapter 10 is not the only analysis of wealth inequality out there, and forthcoming work by other economists (some conclusions of which can be seen here) suggests that Mr Piketty’s figures actually understate the true extent of growth in the concentration of wealth.

Mike Konczal piles on, saying Giles misconstrues Piketty’s argument:

[R]ising inequality in the ownership of capital is not the necessary, major driver of the worries of the book. It isn’t that the 1% will own a larger share of capital going forward. It’s that the size and importance of capital is going to go big. If the 1% own a consistent amount of the capital stock, they have more income and power as the size of the capital stock increases relative to the economy, and as it takes home a larger slice. However, obviously, if inequality in wealth ownership goes up, it will make the situation worse. (It’s noteworthy that these numbers Giles is analyzing aren’t introduced until Chapter 10, after Piketty has gone through the growth of capital stock and the returns to capital at length in previous chapters.)

The way that Giles could put a serious dent into Piketty’s theory through this analysis is by showing that inequality of wealth ownership is falling in the recent past. This is not what Giles finds. He mostly finds what Piketty finds, except in England, where it’s flat instead of slightly growing in the recent past.

But Cowen takes the data problems seriously:

Now, when you cut through the small stuff, the new empirical problem seems to be that UK revisions, combined with a population-weighted series for Europe, contradicts Piketty’s claim of rising wealth inequality for Europe.  I would call that a serious problem.  I am not impressed by the “downplaying” responses which focus on coding errors, Swedish data points, and the other small stuff.  Let’s face up to the real (new) problem, namely that robustness suddenly seems much weaker.

In any case, Patrick Brennan believes that Piketty never made a convincing case for his general thesis:

Piketty set out to do something much more audacious than prove that income inequality is rising in the United States and in most wealthy countries — that’s relatively easy to prove, even if the increase has been substantially overstated. Rather, he wanted to show that this plays into a loop with increasing wealth that needs to be arrested by huge global interventions. One common objection to Giles’s skepticism tonight has been that increasing wealth inequality is simply an obvious fact of this world — why do we need the data to back it up? Well, Piketty needs the data to back up the arguments he made with it — he needs wealth inequality not just to appear high or to be rising, but to be returning to 19th-century levels as a matter of economic inevitability. The errors he made may not be devastating to the work he’s done to prove this so far, but even without taking them into account, he hasn’t yet justified his dramatic conclusions.

Lastly, noting that data errors are a fact of life in the social sciences, Nate Silver encourages skepticism of both Piketty’s argument and Giles’ critique:

The closest thing to a solution is to remain appropriately skeptical, perhaps especially when the research finding is agreeable to you. A lot of apparently damning critiques prove to be less so when you assume from the start that data analysis and empirical research, like other forms of intellectual endeavor, are not free from human error. Nonetheless, once the dust settles, it seems likely that both Piketty and Giles will have moved us toward an improved understanding of wealth inequality and its implications.

Previous Dish on Capital here.