WWCD--What Would Clinton Do?

Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias say liberals have won most of the fight on separation of church and state and shouldn't push for total victory. Most of the comments on Kevin's post were fears about the slippery slope. I commented:

I agree with Kevin and Matt. Let the ACLU fit the issues, not the Democratic party. But the question is what does a Democratic politician say, i.e., WWCD (what would Clinton do)?

For abortion, Clinton used "safe, legal, and rare". That's a formula that provides some cover. I don't remember a comparable formula on religion issues. Anyone have any good ideas, better than: "I don't have a dog in that fight"?

Seems as if there ought to be a good formula. I'm posting this to remind myself to think about it.

What Are You Politically?

Thanks to David Greenberg guest blogging at danieldrezner.com for the link to the Pew Research Center and its report on how the electorate breaks down. It includes a typology test so you can see where you fit in the spectrum. (I came out a Liberal, 19 percent of us are.)

Fairfax County, Lake Woebegon, and Teen Sex

Fairfax County is Lake Woebegon Territory: All of our teenagers are abstinent, except those next door.

No scoring please, don't even try to steal second base.

Booklets Approved For Fairfax Sex-Ed: "Several parents and board members found fault with 'Birth Control Choices' because it said abstinence 'can range from no sexual touching at all to everything except intercourse.'

'It sent a mixed message,' said board member Brad Center (Lee). 'I think we need to be clear when dealing with kids that abstinence is abstinence.'"

Phasing Out Farm Subsidies, Is Samuelson Right?

Robert Samuelson mourns the dearth of budget-cutting zeal in Washington. He includes this statement:

"Plenty of programs could disappear without serious ill effects. Here are two of my regular favorites: farm subsidies and Amtrak. The CBO estimates that from 2006 to 2010 farm subsidies will cost $97 billion. If they were phased out, food would still be grown and the agricultural sector would still be viable. "

I'd challenge the "serious ill effects", because Mr. Samuelson ignores the lessons of history. It may well be true that the subsidies should be eliminated, but you cannot phase out subsidies of that size without serious effects. Economists believe that the subsidies get capitalized into land values. A farmer who's subsidized is able to pay a higher yearly rent for cropland, or to pay a higher price to buy cropland, thus pushing up values.
We should remember that we've had two experiments in phasing out subsidies: in the 1970's and with Freedom to Farm in 1996. Neither one suggests an easy road to eliminating subsidies.

In the 1970's after the Russian grain deal we were planting fence row to fence row, subsidies were almost zero, and land values soared. They reached a peak in the early 80's, then the bubble burst and values plunged. What happened then? (See this article in the Austin Daily Herald: land prices in one Texas county rose to $2112 per acre in 1981, then plunged to $531 in 1985. They've now risen to $2,821. )

The farmers who had inherited land and been cautious in expanding were okay. The farmers who had been bullish went bust. They were caught with mortgages based on high values for land that grew only low priced crops. As a result bankruptcies and suicides rose, rural banks went under, county tax rolls were decimated, people left farming, farms got bigger. The rural areas demanded relief. That stalwart of free enterprise and smaller government, Ronald Reagan, caved. Beginning in 1983 we had unprecedented (then) levels of subsidy.

Newt Gingrich and Pat Roberts pushed the 1996 Freedom to Farm law as a phaseout of the subsidy programs. It worked so well that subsidies over the last 10 years have dwarfed even Reagan's record.

Assuming that budget deficits and WTO rules result in drastic cuts of subsidies, when the current bubble in farmland bursts, the only reason we won't see a repeat of 1981-5 is that there are fewer farmers around to go bust.

Idea--Sorting Trash through RFID

In Reston we're supposed to sort trash three ways: newspapers, bottles and cans, and trash. But in Japan they sort into many more categories, as described in this NYTimes story: How Do Japanese Dump Trash? Let Us Count the Myriad Ways

"YOKOHAMA, Japan - When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to 10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights included detailed instructions on 518 items."

What was interesting was the social pressure on nonconformers to sort. I suspect the Japanese language has no word for "busybody".

Recognizing that more recycling is a necessity, wanting not to impose government restrictions on citizens, and seeing that what we have here is a problem of communication, I suggest that as stores like Walmart implement RFID (the tags that broadcast a limited set of information over a very short distance, like those the Fairfax library is now using on books) the information should include data needed for recycling. (This assumes the RFID tag can be incorporated in the item so it's not removed when the buyer gets it home.) That way we only need to sort tagged items out into a separate bin. The trash people empty the collections from such bins onto a conveyor belt, the RFID reader reads the information and sorts the item accordingly.

Idea--Sentencing Guidelines or Community Standards

Societies and bureaucracies face the problem of uniformity versus diversity: given reality (yes, you have to accept the gift) strict rules don't work in all cases but basic fairness calls for similar cases to receive similar treatment. In the '80's Congress came up with sentencing guidelines for federal judges to ensure that someone convicted of a crime in Maine would receive roughly the same sentence as someone in Arizona. Last (?) term the Supreme Court struck down the guidelines as too restrictive, too much of an encroachment by the legislature into the judicial realm. Congress is now considering raising minimum sentences to achieve much the same result. Meanwhile, New York is essentially backing away from the Rockefeller minimum sentence law that was very hard on drug offenders.

I've an alternative to offer. As usual it's technocratic and incorporates principles of feedback and transparency. A parallel is found in from tax software, that compares your tax return to the national average. It is:

• have DOJ set up a central database/Internet application
• for each conviction, the federal judge enters data on the crime (the data would fit parameters of the sentencing guidelines, i.e., age of malefactor, prior convictions, gun involved, etc.)
• the judge enters his or her proposed sentence
• the software compares the sentence to all others given for the same crime and similar parameters.
• the judge can decide whether or not to adjust the sentence to fit more closely the national averages.
• the public could see the judge's record over time.
  

The theory is that this idea would permit judges to be free to use their discretion to fit oddball cases. Because judges and everyone else would have the feedback information, the tendence would be for sentences to cluster near the national average.

The Real Intelligence Failure

Seems to me that everyone (except me of course) has missed the real Iraq intelligence failure. The WMD issue seems relatively trivial. Suppose Bush knew on September 12 that Hussein had no significant stockpiles of any WMD. He still could, and most likely would, have made the case for military force to get the inspectors back in. He'd have pointed to the fact that Hussein still had the scientists and therefore the knowledge and therefore the potential threat, both in himself and in providing stuff to bin Laden. Because Hussein's cooperation with the reinstalled inspectors in January/February 2003 wasn't sufficient for Bush and Blair, Bush would still have gone to war. So better WMD intelligence might not have changed decision making.

Where the intelligence establishment failed was in the assessment of the state of Iraq's economy and society. There's been no evidence in all of the postmortems that much attention was paid to the subject. Everyone just assumed, as Wolfowitz I think said, that it would be easy to get the oil flowing. We also assumed that we could easily improve the state of the economy, more electricity in particular. Finally we assumed that an invasion and overthrow of the government would not unleash any energies, like looters. In part we may have been misled by the aftermath of the Afghanistan conflict.

It looks to me as if Bush was the victim of the bureaucracy--bureaucracies shape the way issues are posed and resolved, as we can see in the case of Iraq. CIA was focused on the threat, on getting secret information, on what is needed to make a decision. It didn't have any customers asking for data on how old the generators were, what Iraq had done given the embargo on spare parts, etc. DOD was focused on the invasion, avoiding a quagmire and minimizing casualties. They were late in planning for post-conflict action. State did planning for the aftermath, but didn't have responsibility. Gen. Garner or Ambassador Bremer should have been called in August 2002 (the Blair election showed that Bush had effectively made the go decision by July) and told: "We aren't sure there's going to be an invasion of Iraq. But if there is, you're in charge of picking up the pieces and rebuilding. You can task the intelligence establishment to try to get all the information you need."

If we had had a "nation building" bureaucracy sitting in the decision making meetings, they might have flagged our lack of information and raised the question of money. Without a bureaucracy to represent that viewpoint, everyone from Bush on down blithely assumed a rosy scenario.

Real ID: Principal versus Principle

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy writes on the Real ID bill (included by House Republicans in the emergency appropriation bill for Iraq/Afghanistan to change requirements for drivers licenses) as commented on by Bruce Schneier here. Kerr is tentatively against Real ID, but thinks Schneier may overstate the case. Without going over the history, current law, and significance of the bill, I'd make these points:

• I wish they'd teach spelling in Minnesota--the bill talks of "principle residence" when they mean "principal".
  
• I don't have major problems with the aim, which is to tighten rules on issuing drivers licenses. As a technocrat, however, I wish we had a debate over identification, national standards, and data privacy.
  
• I do believe in encryption, both of the data contained on the card and the data in state databases. The occasions when the license needs to be swiped should be rare, and readability should be limited to authorized agents of the state. If private entities want to swipe the card, let them OCR it.

Unfortunately the U.S. doesn't have a rational debate about identification, security, and data privacy. Since we don't and won't, I say:

* we should be doing away with the social security number, not further embedding it into our systems (Unlike other data it often serves both to identify and authenticate the person, which violates good security logic.)
* the implementation of Real ID should be flexible. The Federal govt. has guidelines for e-authentication that agencies are in the process of implementing, but that seems to be a separate line of discussion/development from Real ID. It's going to be expensive to implement both; we ought to be doing them logically.
* RealID ought to include restrictions on the state databases, including provisions for audit trails and transaction logs, encryption of data, provision for review and access.

A Career Spent Learning How the Mind Emerges From the Brain - New York Times

A piece in the NYTimes on How the Mind Emerges From the Brain:
Dr. Gazzaniga was a founder of cognitive science, often focusing on people who had the link between the left and right hemispheres of their brain. In one case, each hemisphere received sensation from one eye:

"Dr. Gazzaniga and Dr. LeDoux showed P. S. a picture of a chicken claw in his right eye and a snow-covered house in the left eye. P. S. pointed to a chicken with his right hand and a snow shovel with his left.

'I'll never forget the day we got around to asking P. S., 'Why did you do that?' ' said Dr. Gazzaniga. 'He said, 'The chicken claw goes with the chicken.' That's all the left hemisphere saw. And then he looks at the shovel and said, 'The reason you need a shovel is to clean out the chicken shed.' '"

The big point to me is that the brain tries desperately, as here, to integrate input into a comprehensible picture/narrative. We make up stories or we ignore or omit data that's inconsistent, as here. You can see the phenomena in blogs, which are people telling themselves stories.

Doctors Do Know Things Patients Don't Know - New York Times

Dr. Kent Sepkowitz writes in the NY today about the pros and cons of having the course of treatment of an illness being directed by the doctor versus the patient, a patient who may have researched the illness on the Web. He says doctors don't want control for ego purposes.

"No, the difference between doctors and patients is that you are stuck playing on our home court. We know all the subtle bumps and slick spots, the places where things suddenly can ricochet out of control. With luck, we know when to pounce and when to shrug, when to grab the phone and start shouting and when to stall another week to see if things quiet down.

Managing an illness, in the best of circumstances, is an uncertain endeavor. Basically here's how it works: you inch along as if groping in blackest night for the light switch, trying first this, then that. Actual guideposts are rare. It can be most unsettling, especially if you haven't tried it before."

The bottom line is that things that look very simple from the outside turn out to be very complex and murky once you start in. Of course, that statement is true of any area of expertise; just ask a do-it-yourselfer who tries to do his own plumbing, etc. I generally give more trust and credence to experts than do the MSM, who almost always are looking in from the outside. But experts always have to remember both Lord Acton ("power corrupts") and the unequalled ability of people to fool themselves.

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