The Dish

[Patrick Appel] Jeffrey Lewis says that we shouldn’t go ahead with the plan to shoot down that dying spy satellite. His reasoning:

Holding aside my general worry that this Administration is not to be trusted with sharp objects, there are specific reasons to be skeptical of both the accuracy and the completeness of this Administration’s calculations.  I strongly suspect that they are systematically discounting two types of hard-to-quantify risks — the possibility of error within the estimates and the political costs to conducting an anti-satellite intercept.

by hilzoy

Via Matt Yglesias, it turns out that the Clinton campaign didn’t manage to field a full slate of delegates in Pennsylvania:

“Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign failed to file a full slate of convention delegate candidates for Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary.

This despite the possibility the primary proves critical and despite Clinton owning the full-throated support of Gov. Rendell, state Democratic Party leadership, Mayor Nutter and, presumably, the organizational skill all that entails.

And despite a Rendell-ordered extension of the filing deadline that could be viewed as more than just coincidental..”

My first reaction was to think: this probably has no practical effect, as long as the missing delegates are spread out among Congressional Districts. A candidate has to win a very large percentage of the vote within a given CD to send all of his or her delegates for that CD to the convention (how large depends on how many delegates that CD gets.) So in most cases, having, say, one delegate too few wouldn’t be a problem. But then I read Atrios, who actually lives in PA, and who suggested that this was wrong. He notes that in PA people vote directly for delegates, and “not having named delegates on the ballot is a problem.”

Hmm, I thought: wouldn’t that mean that if everyone voted for his or her preferred candidates’ entire slate of delegates, the PA primary would essentially be winner-takes-all for each CD? And doesn’t that violate Democratic Party rules? So, reluctantly, I decided to do some research. And since the Iron Law of Blogging holds that no good research should go unpublished, I’m about to inflict it on you.

First: in PA, people do, in fact, vote for delegates, as well as for President. But the votes for delegate determine not which delegates will actually go to the Convention (so that if, say, all of Clinton’s delegates got more votes than any of Obama’s delegates within a particular CD, that CD would send a 100% Clinton slate to the Convention.) Rather, the candidates are given (pdf) a certain number of delegates based on the candidates’ share of the popular vote, and the votes for delegate (along with other rules designed to ensure roughly equal representation for men and women) determine delegates’ rank on a given candidate’s slate.

Second, as the original article notes, the DNC’s rules (pdf) state that “if a presidential candidate (including uncommitted status) has qualified to receive delegates and alternates but has failed to slate a sufficient number of delegate and alternate candidates, then additional delegates and alternates for that preference will be selected in a special post-primary procedure.” (13c, p. 19.) So there’s really no possibility that Clinton could wind up ceding delegates as a result of her failure to submit complete slates.

It’s another unforced error, and it comes at a time when the Clinton campaign does not need any more questions about competence. But as far as I can tell, it will not affect the actual allocation of delegates.

by Reihan

The title says it all. But why might President Bush seek to reverse our Cuba policy?

(1) It’s a legacy-building move, a bid for respect from foreign policy mandarins.

(2) It could be part of a substantive change of heart on the issue: a conviction that smothering commercial and cultural engagement is preferable to confrontation.

(3) Then, of course, there is the propaganda coup against clownofascist Hugo Chavez.

(4) At the risk of sounding absurd, consider the intra-family dynamics. Jeb is essentially an honorary Cuban reactionary, and I mean that in the best sense. (Those guys are cool, and they wear amazing hats.) He is also, let’s be frank, the favorite son. Why not show Jebbie who’s boss and win warm accolades from everyone north of West Palm Beach?

To be sure, there are plenty of reasons not to do it, most of them political.

(1) Florida will be tough for McCain to hold as it is (or not), and this might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

(2) The Cuban American National Foundation types have long memories, and it does seem as though Castroism is on its last legs regardless. Why stick your neck out?

(3) And a visceral hostility to the mandarinate might be reason enough not to do "give in," so to speak.

Another possibility would be for President Bush to make his move after the presidential election. This will happen shortly after he rides, Dr. Strangelove-style, a mammoth bunker-buster deep into the heart of Teheran. Or after he joins the World Federalist Society.

[Patrick Appel] A reader writes:

In this morning’s dissent of the day, a reader writes:

Clearly, at least in the past 50 or so years, the U.S. has been on the side of the curve where cutting taxes results in increased economic activity which results in greater tax receipts for the Federal government.

Not so fast.  Republicans take it as an article of faith that lowering taxes will increase revenues.  Based on their logic, we should lower taxes to zero and achieve *infinite* revenue. [insert Dr. Evil pinky laugh here]

For some time, economists have agreed that we are on the "other" side of the Laffer curve where tax cuts will only serve to lower revenue.

Here’s more info from Time:

If there’s one thing that economists agree on, it’s that these claims are false. We’re not talking just ivory-tower lefties. Virtually every economics Ph.D. who has worked in a prominent role  in the Bush Administration acknowledges that the tax cuts enacted during the past six years have not paid for themselves–and were never intended to. Harvard professor Greg Mankiw, chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005, even devotes a section of his best-selling economics textbook to debunking the claim that tax cuts increase revenues.

I don’t advocate raising taxes just to increase revenue.  I think that controlling spending is the first order of business, but Republicans have been distorting the debate for some time on this Laffer curve issue and they need to be called out on it.

by Reihan

"Nah, I didn’t even see that in a video game!"

It’s true: Dwight Howard’s dunk is so powerful that it is being deployed to address the threat of catastrophic global climate change. You heard it here first.

[Jim Manzi]

Reihan points me to Noam Scheiber’s TNR article (pdf) “Freaks and Geeks” from last year which takes on Steve Levitt and the tendency of many contemporary economists to focus on what Scheiber calls "clean identification" or “natural experiments”: situations in which it’s supposedly easy to discern the causal forces in play because only a single variable of interest is believed to have changed.  What this usually boils down to is that you have some accidental (and therefore roughly randomized) division of otherwise “identical” people into two groups.  One group (the test group) participates in some program, receives some treatment, gets some benefit or whatever, and a second group (the control group) does not.  Scheiber argues that this represents an inappropriate focus on cleverness rather than substance, because it leads economists to try to work forward from a methodology of clean identification to whatever “cute” problems can be addressed in this manner, instead of working backward from labor, income and other important problems to whatever methods are required to address them.

It seems to me that Scheiber walks all around the perimeter of a fundamental point, but doesn’t quite see it. 

An important goal (and in my view, the important goal) of any useful science, social or physical, is to develop reliable, non-obvious predictive rules of the form “If X, then Y”.  We can roughly describe such findings as operationally useful discoveries of causality.  As an example, in physics, you don’t get a lot of points for the law that says “If I let go of this pencil it is very likely to fall”.  You do get to be quite famous if you figure out and demonstrate that “If I let go of this pencil and this thousand-pound ball, they will fall at about the same rate approximately governed by the following equation”.  This is the value-add of science.

The mathematical machinery of empirical economics and social science is largely an attempt to isolate causality in the complex world of human behavior.  The problem is that the data available to us almost never permits reliable isolation of causality.  Human society is so complex and our data sets are so limited that no amount of analytical sophistication is sufficient to crack this problem on a systematic basis.  Hence, to take an obvious example, nobody really knows if we are about to enter a recession in 2008.

The use of natural experiments represents an attempt to take this problem of causality seriously.  It is therefore exactly backwards to view this movement within economics as unserious.  The causality problem, however, runs deep – natural experiments are often insufficient to isolate causality because subtle differences exist between the test and control populations.  I have written a long blog post on why such effects make twin / adoption studies surprisingly unable to resolve the question of the relationship between race and IQ.  In a book review, I go into some detail about how Levitt’s “clean identification” of an abortion – crime linkage suffers from this same defect.  In my experience, it is very hard to find such analyses of natural experiments that don’t dissolve upon careful investigation.  Note that I’m not just saying that the findings from such studies are inexact, but I’m making the much stronger statement that we don’t reliably know whether the purported causal relationships exist at all.

The only partial solution is to run actual experiments.  Much of the behavioral economics movement, in fact, can be seen as the effort to conduct true controlled experiments, even if they tend to be in very narrow circumstances that then raise the problem of how we can reliably generalize them to a sufficient degree of abstraction to support large-scale policy decisions.  Larger-scale experiments – more like clinical drug trials – in which substantial numbers of people are randomly assigned to treatment and control groups for long periods of time, are the next logical step, and in my view should become an increasingly important tool for economics and social science.  Even such experiments are imperfect, but would represent the closest we could come to reliable, though provisional, knowledge.

This perspective calls upon us to take a very humble view of economics and social science.  We scratch and claw to find small, isolated and provisional causal insights in a sea of uncertainty.  The only honest answer to most important questions is usually “We don’t know”.  Said differently, the Hayekian critique of planning and scientism remains valid, and the Law of Unintended Consequences remains in force.

Without wanting to restate the (small l) libertarian program, the basic political conclusion is that we should be extremely skeptical of government-sponsored intrusions in market or social arrangements.  We need an open society with a high degree of freedom because its “waste” is required to discover what works.  Call it the Conservatism of Doubt.

[Peter Suderman]

Typical libertarians, always projecting! Or so says Ezra, who goes on to argue that… 

The liberal vision on health care, however, is not the libertarian’s dream of a perfect market, checked by individual consumer preferences, but paid for by the government. Most liberals think that implausible. In the aggregate, the individual consumer will never have enough information or enough expertise to exert effective control over the medical industry. People don’t comparison shop when they have a heart attack, they don’t know how to effectively contrast chemotherapy providers when their doctor tells them they need to start treatment now. Confronting illness — much less physical trauma — is not like buying a television. You can’t walk away from the deal, and you’re in a terrific state of fear and urgency before you ever speak to a salesman. 

Which is why liberal solutions don’t try and force the individual into a governing role he or she is not equipped to assume. That’s not to say we don’t want to give them the maximum possible information and price transparency, but we don’t believe that to be a sufficient answer to the health care crisis. An actual solution will require reforms far above the level of the individual. The incentives of providers will have to be reworked to prize wellness over profits, or at least to align profits with wellness, rather than simply with treatments. The government is going to have to step in with a lot of money for the sort of comparative effectiveness research the private sector has been stubbornly unwilling to carry out on any large scale. 

First of all, I think Ezra overstates the prevalence of emergency care. Not every medical situation is a dire one; in most cases, in fact, you’re not about to die if care isn’t given as soon as possible. Usually, those seeking care do have some time—even if only a few days or weeks—to make informed choices of their own. But because they’re so insulated from costs due to the current insurance regime, they have no incentive to do so. 

Anyway, I think his response fails to address my original point, which was that, no matter what, some entity needs to record and make available various health care metrics in order to make decisions about care. But there’s no guarantee—and in fact, I’d argue that there’s actually less of a guarantee—that the government is or will be equipped or willing to reliably do so.

Let’s think about this for a minute. He argues first that individuals are doomed to lack the sort of information necessary to make choices about their health care. And then he argues that the government needs to spend "a lot of money" on effectiveness research. Presumably, if the consumer is unable to make determinations for him or herself, that means the government will be doing so instead. So although he pays some lip service to giving individuals the "maximum possible information and price transparency," what Ezra essentially wants to do is leave health care decisions in the hands of bureaucrat-experts (presumably, in a largely or fully public system, the ratings and determinations of the government body are followed by the health providers). And as I pointed out before, the government isn’t exactly a bastion of accuracy and honesty when it comes to self-assessment.

But even taking the label of health bureaucrats in a non-pejorative sense, I’m not comfortable with the notion of putting government in charge of health-care metrics. For one thing, I’m apprehensive about the idea that individuals shouldn’t be trusted—or at least given the option—to manage and determine as many of their own health decisions as possible. And for another—and this was my original point—even if your government-run comparative effectiveness research board consists of the most honest, decent, and committed public servants in the history of the nation, they’re still going to be subject to a variety of outside incentives.

Those bureaucrats may not be elected themselves, but they’ll be appointed by elected officials. And elected officials will, for example, care about rising health care costs. The CBO projects that medical spending will make up the bulk of the rise in entitlement costs over the coming decades. As it is, cost issues already result in what I would consider morally dubious ideas about who’s required to cough up for health-care. And, as Michael Cannon noted recently, government-run health care doesn’t always bring the sort of cost efficiencies its proponents expect. And you have the fact that concerns about costs also lead to regimes like the one in Britain, where the NHS has been known to make medical treatment conditional on patient behavior. 

So even if individual knowledge about health care is never perfect—and Ezra’s probably right that it never will be—I’d still prefer to leave those choices in the hands of individuals anyway, to open up health insurance markets rather than further regulate them, to find ways to give everyone more information on which to make their own decisions rather than simply assuming that it’s hopeless and throwing bundles of taxpayer money at the problem.

[Patrck Appel] Castro unexpectedly resigning this morning is the big news of the day. Here is an excerpt from his statement:

To my dearest compatriots, who have recently honored me so much by electing me a member of the Parliament where so many agreements should be adopted of utmost importance to the destiny of our Revolution, I am saying that I will neither aspire to nor accept, I repeat, I will neither aspire to nor accept the positions of President of the State Council and Commander in Chief.

Judah at Headline Junky didn’t think Castro would ever give up power voluntarily: 

Granted, his brother Raul (no spring chicken at 76) is likely to succeed him, and Fidel might still play a significant background role as power broker, health permitting. But nothing about the man seemed to lend itself to a slow decline and gradual fade out. I always expected his successor would have to pry power from Fidel’s dead hands. Instead, the hand has grown to frail to maintain its grip.

Otto Reich’s two cents:

Fidel has not run the country since July of 2006 but as long as he is alive no Cuban will dare challenge his power. The average Cuban, as well as the leaders, are far too afraid of physical retaliation from Castro. And with good reason. In fact, I suspect many Cubans will see this resignation as a trick by the Castro brothers to see who attempts to fill Castro’s shoes. On the other hand, the jockeying for position within the leadership, which has already begun, will intensify.

Matt Cooper thinks we should end the Cuba embargo:

The current U.S. position, enshrined in law no less, is that the Cuban government must commit to its own destruction before any easing can begin. That’s not going to happen. Like it or not, the current Cuban government will, according to our own Defense Intelligence Agency, survive after Castro’s death. We can either be a part of helping Cuba change or we can leave it to the Europeans or worse Hugo Chavez and the Chinese. It would have been nice if our embargo had brought down Castro and brought democracy to Cuba. It didn’t work. It’s time for a change.

Obama is first of out of the gate with comment:

If the Cuban leadership begins opening Cuba to meaningful democratic change, the United States must be prepared to begin taking steps to normalize relations and to ease the embargo of the last five decades. The freedom of the Cuban people is a cause that should bring the Americans together.

The image above is from June 1970. It depicts Cuban President Fidel Castro during a press conference in Havana. By AFP/Getty.

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

“Fidel Castro stepped down Tuesday morning as the president of Cuba after a long illness, according to Granma, the official publication of the Cuban Communist Party. His resignation ends one of the longest tenures as one of the most all-powerful communist heads of state in the world.

In late July 2006, Mr. Castro, who is 81, handed over power temporarily to his brother, Raúl Castro, 76, and a few younger cabinet ministers, after an acute infection in his colon forced him to undergo emergency surgery. Despite numerous surgical procedures since then, he has never fully recovered, but he has remained active in running government affairs from behind the scenes.

Now, just days before the national assembly is to meet to select a new head of state, Fidel Castro resigned permanently in a letter to the nation, and signaled his willingness to let a younger generation assume power. He said his failing health made it impossible to return as president.

“I will not aspire to, neither will I accept — I repeat I will not aspire to, neither will I accept — the position of President of the Council of State and Commander in chief,” he wrote.

He added: “It would betray my conscience to occupy a responsibility that requires mobility and the total commitment that I am not in the physical condition to offer.””

It is unclear how much will change immediately:

“Mr. Castro also indicated that he is not fading into the sunset, but would continue to be a force in Cuban politics through his writings, just as he has over the last year and a half. “I am not saying goodbye to you,” he wrote. “I only wish to fight as a soldier of ideas.”

That statement raised the possibility that little would change after Sunday’s vote, that Cuba would continue to be ruled in essence by two presidents, with Raúl Castro on stage while Fidel Castro lurks in the wings. At times over the last year and a half, the current government has seemed paralyzed when the two men disagreed. For his part, Mr. Castro has sent several signals in recent months that it was time for a younger generation to take the helm. He said in December, for example, “My primary duty is not to weld myself to offices, much less obstruct the path of younger people.””

But change has begun.

[Peter Suderman]

More fodder for the gender wars: A new Nielson survey of online video viewing habits shows a substantial gap in viewing patterns between men and women.

The big broadcast networks are failing to effectively reach 18- to-34-year-old men online, according to fresh analysis from Nielsen Online’s new video measurement service, VideoCensus.

Indeed, video streams at network TV sites were nearly two times more likely to be viewed by women ages 18-34 than men, who accounted for 22% and 12% of streams, respectively.

I’m not sure I can come up with a solid explanation for the discrepancy. My first thought was that maybe men watch more video from the office and are thus more prone to watching shorter clips—filler between projects or quick breaks from whatever they’re working on. But hourly viewing patterns suggest otherwise. The most popular period for viewing network TV offerings online is the lunch hour—12 p.m. to 2 p.m. User generated clips are most viewed in the wee hours of the night, from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. This would seem to indicate that user-generated content is not being used primarily to kill time at the office. So the mystery remains.

Personally, I’m skeptical that online offerings of network television programming will really take off until they can be effectively merged with TV (Michael Hirschorn makes this case at length in the March Atlantic). Instead, the shift that most interests me—or at least the one that’s had the most significant effect—is the rise of easy portable video. I picked up an iPod touch last fall and have found that it’s a nearly perfect device for watching my favorite shows. It fills in the gaps—downtime spent on trains, in waiting areas, or fighting with one of the many infuriating machines at the gym—quite nicely. Shows like 24 and Gossip Girl, which require only minimal attention, make perfect midday distractions. And the best part is, you never have to feel guilty about "wasting time" watching lowbrow television. Instead of carving out an hour or two in the evening, you can take care of it during the free minutes scattered throughout your day.