Adverse Selection

Ezra had the day off, so he had us fill in for him. I'd wanted to post something explaining adverse selection for a while, so that's what I did. This is a post that will Teach You Something about economics, and I'd encourage you to go check it out.

Yglesias and democracy

Solid Matt post on how democracy actually spreads [now gone from the internet].  The one thing I'd add is that part of the motivation behind actually invading Iraq, rather than just letting democracy run its course over the decades, was a desire to act in big dramatic explosion-involving ways after 9/11. When you add in confusion among benighted segments of the electorate about whether Saddam was responsible for 9/11, you've got a recipe for the dumb, violent, ineffective form of democracy-promotion.

Miers and Roberts

My latest at the good Mr. Klein's: "given what seems to be the case with Miers, Bush simply didn't care about advancing deep conservative goals with his second nominee. So why should I think he tried with the first?"

Missing voters

How can Democrats mobilize poor nonvoters? As I argue, it's hard. What I do know is that our policies help them, and that there's a big challenge in trying to get useful policies to win you elections. (This is kind of a typical Neil-post-at-Ezra's, in that I sympathetically but critically examine things that my liberal buddies say. Also, I go all John Edwards Crazy at the end.)

I asked, and I received

In response to a query, friend Tony offers some good thoughts on why we actually do want Paul Hackett going up against Mike DeWine, instead of Sherrod Brown. I agree with a lot of what he says, though I'm still concerned about the fundraising angle.

Imagining conditionals and trouble for Kant

Responding to Aidan's concerns about imagination and modality, I'm going to spell out in greater detail how one comes to know the truth-value of subjunctive conditionals, and how one evaluates claims about necessary truths truth or falsity.

First, subjunctive conditionals, which have the form "if p were true, q". We imagine the closest world where p and then apply our whole set of beliefs to the facts of that world, to determine whether q in that world. So suppose I'm considering the subjunctive conditional, "If Gore had won the election, America wouldn't have invaded Iraq." I imagine the counterfactual situation, and extend my imagination into the future by applying my beliefs about Gore's intelligence, honesty, and rationality. My beliefs lead me to imagine a world where Gore doesn't invade Iraq and instead launches some kind of global antipoverty program after invading Afghanistan. So I accept the subjunctive conditional.

Now, claims about necessary truths. Let me just consider those which have the form "necessarily, if p then q". This actually seems simpler for the imagination account than the case of subjunctive conditionals does. "necessarily, if p then q" is false iff the following obtains in any one world: "p ^ ¬q". So we just try to imagine a world where p ^ ¬q obtains. If we can successfully imagine such a thing, the claim is false.

This, it seems to me, is exactly how I go about trying to think up counterexamples. Kant says, "If everyone made false promises all the time, then the institution of promising would necessarily collapse." He intends his claim to hold across all worlds, not just ones close to ours, so I'm licensed to imagine some pretty wacky worlds. I can imagine a world where everyone makes false promises all the time. Can I imagine the institution of promising flourishing there? Well, yes, if I imagine also that there's a psychoactive chemical in the water that causes everyone to forget all false promises, and gives them false memories according to which people have made great sacrifices to keep their promises. Since I can imagine (a world full of false promising) ^ ¬(the collapse of the institution of promising), Kant's claim is false.

Not actually an endorsement

This is what we want to hear:

"Not to my recollection have I ever sat down with her [to discuss abortion]," Bush said Tuesday at his first solo press conference since May. "What I have done is understand the type of person she is and the type of judge she will be."

The president said he has never discussed abortion with any of his judicial nominees. "There is no litmus test," he said.

Bush also defended the 60-year-old Miers, who came to Washington with him from Texas in 2001 and has been White House counsel since February, against Democratic charges of cronyism and questions about her conservative record, saying she shares his legal philosophy.

Looking at her blog, it would seem that their agreement on legal philosophy is pretty far-reaching!

Note: this post once contained an endorsement of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. Sorry, just thinking about this situation for too long makes me go all unserious.

She's embarrassing. Not terrifying.

TLaura's post on the embarrassing and the terrifying sums up my feelings on the substantive Miers-related issues quite well.

Imagination and modality at FBC

For philosophers who can pull themselves away from gawking at the distraught Republicans, Jonathan has a nice post on connections between modality and imagination. I've wondered for a while whether one can use imagination to explain modal thought and discourse in the way that philosophers like Gibbard use (supposed) mental states of norm-acceptance to explain normative thought and discourse. I haven't thought enough about this to say anything particularly good, but I like Jonathan's observation that imagining and belief often interact as follows: we imagine a particular situation where (perhaps among other things) p is the case, and our belief that p -> q causes us to imagine q subsequently happening.

The old-girls' network

Looks like Harriet Miers graduated from Southern Methodist University with a degree in mathematics in 1967, and got her law degree there in 1970. Laura Bush graduated from SMU with a degree in education in 1968. Wikipedia has Miers meeting George Bush in the 1980s, but she could've met Laura 15 years earlier. Of course, there's no evidence that they met, or that Miers' nomination resulted from pictures of Laura Bush Gone Wild.

Harry, thanks for Harriet

I haven't been reading many liberal reflections on the Miers nomination. There aren't many out there yet, and it's fun to watch Republicans freak out for a change.

Democrats seem to be in a pretty strong position. As she's never been a judge and she's Bush's personal lawyer, we'll be able to attack on cronyism if we want. If we find evidence of a serious anti-choice streak, we can attack on ideological issues as well. But having the cronyism point in our pocket is pretty nice.

We should take a moment now to reflect on the skill of our Democratic Senators in getting us here. This is a judge who forces Dobson to roll the d20 to save against Souterization. Had we lost the filibuster fight or set up our defenses badly in the Roberts vote, Bush would've been able to pick some extreme candidate with clear right-wing views, and Republicans would be rejoicing. But we saved the filibuster and we used it to set an ambush that could possibly destroy any extreme right-wing nominee. I'm proud of Harry Reid, and you should be too.

I don't know how she'll rule on business-related issues. But whatever the answer is, she's 60 years old. Win election 2016, and you're in good shape.

Harriet Miers

At this moment it's interesting to look at Ezra's Sitemeter. Google searches for "Harriet Miers" fill the first page and a half of referring links. She was, after all, nominated to the Supreme Court. But what's the very first among all of the Harriet Miers searches?

That's right. "Harriet Miers naked". Harry Reid, I know that you're trying to find incriminating evidence on Bush's nominees, but this is going too far.

[Update] Looking closely at the Kentucky address on the Sitemeter page, and at the horror on Redstate, one wonders -- is it actually Mitch McConnell at the keyboard?

The Ancient Wisdom of Refundable Tax Credits

If you want to learn some really important stuff about tax policy, I recommend this post I've put up at Ezra's place.

The water's too warm

Ezra cites the following poll:

"Canada has a universal health care system run by the government that covers all people. Compared to Canada, do you think the overall health care system in the United States is better, worse or about the same?"
Better: 29%
Worse: 37%
Same: 23%
Unsure: 11%

The first thing to say is that there's a bit of push in the first sentence of the poll. If most people like the idea of universal coverage (as I'm guessing they do) it's going to make the poll an inaccurate measure of basic public sentiment about Canada itself, since some people might not know that Canada has universal coverage. On the other hand, "run by the government" probably isn't widely regarded as a plus, so maybe it balances out. I guess if you're looking for a poll that gives you feelings about US and Canadian health care contaminated by feelings about government-run universal coverage, this might be the poll for you.

But I don't think this difference is sufficient to account for the difference between the poll results and the American-health-care-boosterism that one encounters in the media. Part of the explanation of that, I think, is the quality of health care enjoyed by the pundit class. People in the media, and most people who you'll find holding forth on the awesomeness of American health care, have the employer-provided health care that's available to educated white-collar professionals, not the absence of health care that's experienced by 45 million uninsured Americans. Rising health care costs are a relatively uninteresting social issue to them rather than an active threat to their well-being.

There's a cartoon I saw on the wall in our department that depicted a man in a Jacuzzi. The caption was, "The system can't be collapsing! The water's too warm."

He's been reading The Nation

Always special to see Josh Marshall link to an webpage that says:

Nevertheless, the tragic fate of the Ewoks seems to have been the subject of a New Republic cover-up.

Intro to violence

From an article on how Palestinian authorities are trying to round up loose weapons:

The crackdown came as dozens of Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank held municipal elections. The powerful Hamas movement was expected to make strong gains, despite a continuing Israeli offensive against Islamic militants.

despite? This is exactly what I'd expect when you turn up the level of violence. I really can't pronounce on whether you create more terrorists than you destroy when you publicly kill a bunch of their leaders, but the electoral consequences of this kind of thing should be pretty obvious. Hamas terrorism makes Israelis run to Likud, and Likud violence makes Palestinians run to Hamas.

New twist in the TAPPED game

In the course of trying to push embarrassing drunk posts further down the page, I'm going to talk about TAPPED, which I regard as the best political blog in existence, since they just added Ezra and got the biggest piece from the tripartite division of Matt. Since the bylines are at the bottom, there's a game I used to play as I read it -- scroll down slowly, and after finishing the post, try to guess the author. I used to be able to pick out Yglesias posts with something like 80% accuracy. But now the addition of Ezra has thrown the whole thing into chaos. It's not so much that I confuse his writing with anyone else, but the addition of an extra possibility has unsettled my judgment to the point that I'm not calling them right. I guess I just have to take time and get used to Ezra-style with a red/black background.

While I'm at it, Ezra's defense of Medicaid is really good.

lampposts and Aeroplanes

When you're drunk and you encounter a lamppost, and you touch your face to it and start kissing it, and you gently stroke the back of the pole as if you're touching the back of her neck, who do you imagine that it is?

Don't actually answer that question in the comments or anything. The point is, that's who you're in love with. And since it's just a lamppost and not her, she probably doesn't know. Which, given the circumstances, is how it has to be.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, by Neutral Milk Hotel, is probably my favorite album of all time. So much of the album seems to be expressing a need for closeness with other people -- most strikingly, a little Jewish girl who died in the Holocaust and whom we all read about in 7th grade, but when Jeff Mangum read about her he was overwhelmed by grief. When I want to be closer than possible to people, it's all I want to listen to.

And here's where your mother sleeps
And here is the room where your brothers were born
Indentions in the sheets
Where their bodies once moved but don't move anymore
And it's so sad to see the world agree
That they'd rather see their faces filled with flies
All when I'd want to keep white roses in their eyes

Why are poor people fat?

First of all, apparently they are. (I'd suspected it, but I was never really sure whether it was just some kind of prejudice working on me.) It's because calorie-dense foods are cheaper, while healthier foods like fruit, fish, and lean meats are more expensive. Given how unhealthy it is to be obese, working to feed the hungry more nutritious foods might help us improve their health prospects in the future.

Ask a Werewolf: Iraq and Terrorism

My latest Ask a Werewolf is up at Ezra's. I like this format, because it indirectly addresses the fact that there's something oddly comical about random bloggers out in the hinterlands offering political strategy advice to high-profile elected officials.