Why Washington Is Broken

Congressman Delaney has an Op-Ed in The Washington Post about our broken Congress and a bill to fix it. As he writes,

Representative democracy is in crisis in the United States. One of the three pillars of our system of government — the legislative branch — is failing. The current Congress has shut down the federal government, bickers constantly and increasingly does not speak broadly to the American people. Obvious problems, from a struggling middle class to a flawed tax code to crumbling roads and bridges, go unaddressed. The American people have certainly noticed; according to Gallup, 80 percent disapprove of Congress

We can’t let 535 people continue to limit the progress of a nation of more than 300 million.

After two decades spent gaining a data-driven perspective in the private sector, I believe that problems on this scale are usually caused by structural failures. Our electoral process has created perverse incentives that have warped our democracy and empowered special interests and a vocal minority. Congressional dysfunction is the logical result of closed primaries, too many gerrymandered one-party seats and low-turnout elections.

To address these problems, I filed the Open Our Democracy Act in July. If passed, the legislation would mandate open primaries for House elections, begin the process of national redistricting reform and make Election Day the equivalent of a federal holiday.

Addressing Delaney's solution to the problem of "broken government" starts with figuring out what's wrong. Delaney doesn't pay much attention to this issue, but I'm happy to do the work for him. Or at the very least, I'll quote some guys who will do the work for him. The key here is understanding the US is a presidential republic, and that this form of government is actually a pretty terrible form of democracy.

We often talk about the "greatness" of American democracy, but we're a huge outlier. There have been quite a few presidential democracies in Latin America. All of them have failed. Basically, the US is the only presidential democracy to have remained stable for a substantial period of time, and there's some very particular reasons for that. I'll get to that in a second. But first, what's so bad with our government? The great Yale Political Scientist Juan Linz identified four key problems back in 1994 in his classic book The Failure of Presidential Democracy. To quote Mainwaring and Shugart's review:

First, in presidential systems, the president and assembly have competing claims to legitimacy. Both powers are popularly elected, and the origin and survival of each is independent from the other. If a majority of legislators favor policies different from those the president pursues, a dramatic conflict between the assembly and the executive can erupt. “No democratic principle exists to resolve disputes between the executive and the legislature about which of the two actually represents the will of the people” (p. 63). Linz argues that parliamentarism obviates this problem because the executive is not independent of the assembly. If the majority of the assembly favors a change in policy direction, it can replace the government by exercising its no-confidence vote.

Second, the fixed term of the president’s office introduces a rigidity that is less favorable to democracy than the flexibility offered by parliamentary systems, where governments are not elected for a fixed term of office but rather depend on the ongoing confidence of the assembly. Because under presidentialism the chief executive cannot bolster his or her authority either through a vote of confidence or by dissolving the parliament to call new elections, presidential leadership can be weaker than that provided by some prime ministers. Presidential constitutions often manifest a contradiction “between the desire for a strong and stable executive and the latent suspicion of that same presidential power” (p. 55). Moreover, it is extremely difficult to remove a president from office, regardless of his/her level of competence and support among legislators and other relevant political actors. By virtue of their greater ability to promote changes in the cabinet and government, parliamentary systems afford greater opportunities for resolving disputes. Such a safety valve may enhance regime stability. 

Just as presidentialism makes it difficult to remove a democratically elected head of government who no longer has support, it usually makes it impossible to extend the term of popular presidents beyond constitutionally set limits. Although such provisions are not inherent in the regime type, most presidential constitutions bar presidents from serving successive terms. Presidents therefore have relatively little time to pursue their projects and, as a result, are often tempted to try to accomplish a great deal in a short term. “This exaggerated sense of urgency on the part of the president may lead to ill-conceived policy initiatives, overly hasty stabs at implementation, unwarranted anger at the lawful opposition, and a host of other evils” (p. 66). 

Third, Linz argues that presidentialism has a winner-takes-all logic that is unfavorable to democratic stability. In parliamentary systems, “Power-sharing and coalition-forming are fairly common, and incumbents are accordingly attentive to the demands and interests of even the smaller parties” (p. 56). In presidential systems, the direct popular election is likely to imbue the president with a feeling that he/she need not undertake the tedious process of constructing coalitions and making concessions to the opposition. Moreover, “The danger that zero-sum presidential elections pose is compounded by the rigidity of the president’s fixed term in office. Winners and losers are sharply defined for the entire period of the presidential mandate... The losers must wait at least four or five years without any access to executive power and patronage” (p. 56). 

Fourth, Linz argues that the “style of presidential politics” is less propitious for democracy than the style of parliamentary politics. In contrast to prime ministers, a president is called upon to be both the head of state and the head of government, and the exigencies of these two roles at times are in conflict. The president’s sense of being the representative of the entire nation may lead him/her to lamentable intolerance of the opposition. The absence in actual presidential systems of a monarch or a ‘president of the republic’ deprives them of an authority who can on occasion exercise restraining power (p. 62)."

In short, presidential democracies are primed for conflict, lack the intra-government mechanisms for solving conflict, lack the democratic mechanisms for resolving conflict and encourage a type of politics that favors greater conflict. With this unfortunate disposition towards political conflict, a couple things tend to happen. The first route is gridlock. It becomes politically favorable to sabotage the ruling party whenever possible. Long-term gridlock causes extra-legislative points of power to emerge. For the US, this means an overactive President and Supreme Court that essentially creates legislation. Once this process no longer becomes tenable, the government dissolves, usually in some form of military junta.

Needless to say, we're lucky to have avoided it. And the saving grace of American politics through the twentieth century was the strange heterogeneity of its political parties. Largely, this was due to Democrats' willingness to accept apartheid as a cost for loyalty in the South. But it led to strange situations where incredibly liberal politician like Nelson Rockefeller were Republicans and incredibly conservative politicians like Strom Thurmond were Democrats. It wasn't surprising for people to reach across the aisle or for voters to have candidates they preferred in both parties. Both liberal and conservative ideologies were widely represented.

The breakdown of this heterogeneity is often attributed to civil rights, but I believe that it was inevitable regardless. This comes from the problem of "first past the post" (FPP) voting. In a voting system where a candidate is elected by a majority of the vote, voters are most likely to get their interests represented if they engage in strategic voting. This usually means to vote for the candidate most similar to your beliefs but also most likely to win.

What do I mean? Imagine a scenario with 4 candidates: Green, Democrat, Republican, Tea. I hope the ideological spectrum becomes clear. Voters pick the candidates most ideologically similar to them, and it turns out that the Democrat wins. This isn't all that bad for the Greens. They got their second-favored choice. For the Teas and Republicans, though, this is a disaster. The Democrat was their third-preferred candidate. So, the next time around, they drop their candidate and vote Republican. This leads to a conservative victory, since the liberals split the vote between their two separate candidates. In the end, this leads the Greens to drop their candidate, leaving us with a fiercely competitive two-party system.

Admittedly, this doesn't always happen so smoothly, but given enough feedback and enough iterations, an FPP voting system finds a sense of equilibrium between two ideologically pure parties. This pattern is empirically confirmed, which is why most countries don't actually vote this way. Those that do tend to have active movements in favor of alternative voting systems. This is what was happening in the UK not too long ago. But it hasn't happened yet in the US, and that's a huge problem. So we all engage in strategic voting. While this is the easiest way for everyone to get their views represented in Washington, this is the worst-case scenario for the American government.

So that's the gist of the problem. We have a government that can't handle conflict. We have a voting system that creates tons of conflict. We're stuck.

How do we get out of this? I don't really know. The last time the US had this much political partisanship was before the Civil War. That ended well. Things ended pretty poorly for most Latin American presidential democracies too.

You have to judge Delaney's recommendations from this perspective. These are all programs that I support, in the name of better democracy, but they only go so far. Gerrymandering is a problem, no doubt, but there would be plenty of partisanship due to Americans' ideological sorting. It turns out that liberals prefer to live with liberals, and conservatives prefer to live with conservatives. This process is known as ideological sorting, and it occurs both between states, and within states. By that, I mean that people tend to move to the state they ideologically prefer, and they tend to live in a ideologically comfortable part of that state. Once you take ideological sorting into account, gerrymandering doesn't have that large of an effect on partisanship.

Open primaries are a nice concept, but research on Louisiana and Washington shows that they have almost no effect and on the partisan composition of governments. Parties remain powerful even without party-driven primaries. This was the chief conclusion of the only expert witness in California's recent drive to create open primaries.

Expanding voting roles is a partisan issue. Democrats believe that they win when more people vote, and Republicans tend to believe that they do better when less people vote. It's hard to see how any self-interested political party would support policies that they know would harm them. Plus, there is a strong ideological current within more conservative circles towards less voter rights. This comes up in the Tea Party push to abolish the direct election of Senators. Nonetheless, research on voting patterns tends to show that total turnout really doesn't matter all that much. Bigger aspects of voter preferences, including punishing incumbent parties, have a much stronger effect.

Again, I don't think that Delaney is proposing something bad. I think these are good ideas, just as I think reducing money in politics is a good thing. But I'm not sure if there's any simple legislative fix to the fundamental problems in the US government. There are fundamental flaws within our democracy, and it will take constitutional amendments to solve them. Considering the current level of partisanship, these aren't all that likely to happen.

I hope that it can continue to limp on for a long while, with small bursts of legislative activity occurring during "wave" years. Otherwise, we'd be best off getting used to a state of permanent dysfunction.

The Limits of Presidential Power

The recent events in Ukraine have helped put a variety of issues into perspective, many of which are only tangentially connected to crisis itself. One of the most interesting features of this discussion involves the limits of Presidential power. Many conservatives see  Obama as a weak leader, who could solve this crisis by simply showing a bit more "force." David Brooks' comments are typical.

Basically since Yalta we’ve had an assumption that borders are basically going to be borders and once that comes into question, if in Ukraine or in Crimea or anywhere else, then all over the world all bets are off. And let’s face it, Obama, whether deservedly or not, does have a — I’ll say it crudely — but a manhood problem in the Middle East.

[...]

Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad or somebody like Putin? I think a lot of the rap is unfair, but certainly in the Middle East there is an assumption that he’s not tough enough.

The problem with Brooks' statement is twofold. First, it assumes that there is no risk of overreaction. Obviously, that's ludicrous, and it requires a willful distortion of recent history to reach this conclusion. More importantly, this criticism masks a terrible misunderstanding the actual power of the presidency, and it's important to set that right. 

 

Calls of tyranny aside, the power of the president is actually quite limited in the American system of government. There's very little that he can do without the support of Congress, and it's telling that the places where Obama's tyranny "rings loudest" are precisely the exact same places where Congress relinquished authority wholeheartedly. You don't have the ongoing NSA scandal, for example, without Congress passing the Patriot Act.

And in this instance, you don't get anything done with Russia without Congressional approval. Thankfully, Congress passed an aid and sanctions package back in April. Considering that these are the primary source of pressure on Putin's government, and they remain the forceful measure in place, we should be happy.

I think most of us know this. After all, we all went to school and were taught that Congress passes the laws. So why do we pretend otherwise. Why do we believe, as you write, that some very marginal changes to regulation are somehow the key to a national economic revival? How could we fool ourselves into thinking that a country with terrible tax policy, no government investment, a failing education system, no competition in major industries and a two-tier class system that guarantees no demand will somehow emerge as an economic giant if a little extra smog allowed? Why, because we all want to subscribe to the "Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency." As Ezra Klein recently explained,

The Founding Fathers were rebelling against an out-of-control monarch. So they constructed a political system with a powerful legislature and a relatively weak executive. The result is that the US President has little formal power to make Congress do anything. He can't force Congress to vote on a bill. He can't force Congress to pass a bill. And even if he vetoes a bill Congress can simply overturn his veto. So in direct confrontations with Congress — and that describes much of American politics these days — the president has few options.

Green Lantern theorists don't deny any of this. They just believe that there's some vague combination of public speeches and private wheedling that the president can employ to bend Congress to his will. Ron Fournier, a prominent Green Lantern theorist, offers a fairly typical prescription for presidential success:

He could talk to the media and the public more often with a more compelling and sustained message. He could build enduring relationships in Washington rather than being so blatantly transactional with his time. He could work harder, and with more empathy, on Capitol Hill to find "win-win" opportunities with Republicans.

The problem with this is that the Green Lantern Theory isn't just false. It's often backwards. The basic idea is that more aggressive and consistent applications of presidential power will break down opposition. But political science research shows the truth is often just the opposite.

When the president takes a position on an issue the opposing party becomes far more likely to take the opposite position. In a clever study, political scientist Frances Lee proved this by looking at noncontroversial issues, like whether NASA should try and send a man to Mars. She built a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and 2004. Typically, these votes fell along party lines just a third of the time. But but when the President took a clear position the likelihood of a party-line vote rose to more than half. In other words, when the president pushed on an issue the opposition party became more likely to oppose him.

The reason is simple: elections are zero-sum affairs. The more the American people perceive the president as successful the less likely they are to vote for the opposition in the next election. "If you're cooperating then it suggests to the public that things are working just fine," explains Lee. "And it undercuts the whole logic of your campaign against the president or the president's party's continuation in office."

The Green Lantern Theory also infantilizes Congress. Take this Maureen Dowd column in which she argues that it's actually the president's job to force Congress to behave, as if the most powerful and democratic branch of the American government is just a bunch of petulant children waiting for discipline:

It is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It's called leadership.

This kind of thing both lets Congress off the hook and confuses Americans about where the power actually lies in American politics — and thus about who to hold accountable.

I'm trying my best to stop writing about Presidential politics, but I also was a long-time believer in the Green Lantern Theory. It's hard to give up. But that doesn't change the truth of the issue. Criticizing the President for the state of American public policy is stupid. There is almost nothing that the President can accomplish without an act of Congress already in place.

It's also a little frightening. For all the problems in government right now, the executive branch isn't nearly as corrupted as Congress. Nor is it as hated or as corrupted. Do you want a major new wave of economic policy that grows the middle class? Focus on how Congress will pass it. Wait, Congress doesn't pass anything these days? Tough, that's the only group of people who will get something done.

 

The same goes for nearly every foreign policy issue. Especially in matters of peace and war, the President rarely operates outside of the scope provided to him from Congress. Obviously, the President is free to direct his administration to conduct diplomacy, but any meaningful measure requires an action of Congress.

This should make you pretty pessimistic, which is appropriate. Thanks to growing partisanship, corruption and an increasing focus on political gamesmanship, our Congress is the least effective that it has ever been. Conservatives, when they speak about President power and "strength" are blinding themselves to the truly important issues facing this country.

 

As my Dad always says, "we have a bought and sold Congress." Getting over this problem involves one of two things: either one side gets control of the presidency and a filibuster-proof majority in both chambers, or we need aggressive citizen action to remake the way we conduct our elections. I don't know if I will see the former in my lifetime, but thankfully Lawrence Lessig is leading the charge to address the latter. I have high hopes for the Mayday PAC, but to reform our political system, we also need to focus in on the fundamental problems. Empty posturing about "manhood" won't get us anywhere.

What Comes Next in Ukraine? A Debate (2)

After the downing of flight MH17, it's worthwhile to take stock of our knowledge of the events on the ground. The tragedy can lead to two very disparate outcomes. On the one hand, the crash could encourage Europe to put the kind of pressure on Russia needed to finally end its meddling. On the other, both sides might see little reason to avoid escalation. In a previous post, I presented the case for the former outcome. I'll now discuss the latter.

While a case could be made that the events in Ukraine have finally reached a decisive point, there is no guarantee that pressure from Europe will force Russia to stop encouraging its proxy war. This is the argument presented by political scientist Paul D'Anieri in The Monkey Cage, which is hosted by The Washington Post. As he writes,

To see why a cease-fire works to Russia’s advantage, the Ukrainian leadership need only look to Ukraine’s western border, where a slice of its neighbor Moldova known as Transnistria has been occupied by pro-Russian forces since 1992. The conflict began when a group that did not want Moldova to secede from the Soviet Union took up arms, with extensive support from the Soviet/Russian military. A cease-fire was declared in July 1992, and the conflict has remained “frozen” ever since.

The Ukrainians can also look to Azerbaijan, where the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has been occupied by Armenia—with support from Russia—for nearly the same period, again after a conflict and cease-fire. Or it can look to Georgia, where a similar practice was followed, until Russia actually invaded, detaching Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008.

Indeed, what is happening in Eastern Ukraine seems not to be a one-off conflict, but rather the most recent in a series of moves by Russia to exploit local tensions and seize bordering territory. The downing of a civilian airliner was madness, but there is method in everything else that Russia has done in Eastern Ukraine.

Of course, the Ukrainians can also look at their own experience with Crimea, where the international community briefly registered outrage at its annexation before returning to business as usual. Russia has spent considerable time and resources building its influence in Europe and in Washington, and it understands how to wield it. While the Dutch and British governments have been vocal in their outrage over the incident, other European leaders have been quieter, preferring, it seems, to try to preserve a constructive working relationship with Russia. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has been particularly reticent, perhaps because of Germany’s long-standing coziness with Russia, and perhaps because of her outrage at the recent revelations of U.S. spying on Germany.

It is natural to ask what ‘the West’ can do to stop the conflict. Raising the cost for Russia may help to deter future aggression, but an enormous amount of empirical research on sanctions shows that their efficacy is extremely spotty. NATO governments have so far has been unwilling to incur major costs to punish Russia. Russia reads this level of commitment clearly: In response to the sanctions enacted over Crimea, Deputy Prime Ministry Dmitry Rogozin tweeted that “NATO people” should “send me your teeth ground in impotent rage.”

In sum, both the Russian and Ukrainian governments are much more realistic about how this will really play out than are international optimists. The Russians know that holding the territory is key, that they can deflect serious consequences, and the demanding a cease-fire helps them do both. The Ukrainians know that the only way they will get their territory back is to take it by force.

D'Aneri's argument fits nicely within the framework of a classic example of Game Theory - the prisoners' dilemma. Most people are aware of this decision-making model, but for those that aren't here's the gist. Under a prisoners' dilemma, two agents are forced to decide whether or not they cooperate. In the case of two prisoners, they can cooperate by both remaining silent. If they do, they have the chance of receiving a reduced sentence. On the other hand, if either testifies against the other, he could potentially avoid prison altogether while condemning his partner to a long sentence. If both agree to testify, both will suffer.

The available choices can be formally described in this kind of table that follows. Game theorists analyze these scenarios by precisely quantifying the potential losses each agent faces in the possible scenarios, but we don't need to go that far for this example.

The prisoners' dilemma, as described by National Affairs.

In the case of Russia and Ukraine, each country is presented with the following choices. They can choose to cooperate by seeking a diplomatic solution, or they can choose noncooperation through military escalation and increased violence. Cooperation would benefit both countries most in the end, by avoiding war, but the costs of backing down whole the other side pushes on are so high that the optimal solution for both sides is to fight on.

Ukraine cannot accept the invasion of Donetsk. It had to fight on, and it has to be prepared to invade Crimea if it is able to secure a position in the East. The current government has almost no legitimacy as it is. How could they claim a mandate to rule if they cannot ensure territorial integrity? Moreover, much of Ukraine's wealth is located in the east, which is home to a majority of its heavy industry. Ukraine is already facing an economic crisis. It's hard to imagine how the western half of the country would function if it did actually split.

Similarly, given the war fever gripping the country, Russia faces such huge domestic costs from backing down - national humiliation at the top of the list, that I'm not sure that we should rule out the chance of an invasion. After all, Russia is now using artillery on the boarder to assault the Ukrainian army advancing on Donetsk. The media have attached so much national value to this 'rescue' of Novorossiya that Putin's standing as a leader is now at stake.

Framing the issue this way, it's hard to see a good reason for Ukraine to stop bombing and Russia to stop shelling. The longer this continues, a diplomatic solution will only become less likely. Residents of Solvyansk and Donetsk are irate by the Ukrainian army's inability to distinguish between rebels and civilians. As I wrote in a previous article, a thousand of people have died and a hundred thousand have already fled. The bad blood won't suddenly dissipate if the Ukrainian and Russian governments magically decide to talk.

Even if this is the beginning of the event, we should definitely expect more violence along the way. Both sides benefit by applying as much force as possible during this critical moment. This makes me wonder if there is a point where the strategic calculus changes. Is there a way to make the price of escalation high enough so that neither side wants to push things further? If we wish to draw the line, where would we want that to be? Would we allow for a Russian invasion?

This is a very difficult question to answer. We have no meaningful alliances with Ukraine, and the threat of nuclear war with Russia lurks, even if it is still very unlikely. We couldn't accept that, which makes me believe that the US and Europe might eventually decide that a Russian invasion is tolerable. We allowed this in Hungary and Prague during the Cold War, and it's arguable that the stakes were much higher then.

Whither the Ivies?

The New Republic has done us all a favor by hosting a terrific debate on the public good of America's elite institutions. Now, there is no doubt that the Ivies and other major private American universities are the best in the world. The problem stems from their role in encouraging economic inequality and furthering the gap between the sliver  of the elite that attends these universities and everyone else.

William Deresiewicz does a brilliant job summarizing these issues, and it's worth reading the entire article. But to pull just one quote selectively,

This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead. The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. As of 2006, only about 15 percent of students at the most competitive schools came from the bottom half. The more prestigious the school, the more unequal its student body is apt to be. And public institutions are not much better than private ones. As of 2004, 40 percent of first-year students at the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes of more than $100,000, up from 32 percent just five years earlier.

The major reason for the trend is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game. The more hurdles there are, the more expensive it is to catapult your kid across them. Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools. The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely. Today, fewer than half of high-scoring students from low-income families even enroll at four-year schools.

The problem isn’t that there aren’t more qualified lower-income kids from which to choose. Elite private colleges will never allow their students’ economic profile to mirror that of society as a whole. They can’t afford to—they need a critical mass of full payers and they need to tend to their donor base—and it’s not even clear that they’d want to.

And so it is hardly a coincidence that income inequality is higher than it has been since before the Great Depression, or that social mobility is lower in the United States than in almost every other developed country. Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.

While it is easy to dismiss this problem as the jeremiads of a particular class and those that aspire to join this class, consider this: we offer these institutions massive subsidies through federal financial aid, the largesse of the national research budget and tax exempt status. My alma mater, Yale University, regularly hands out multimillion dollar salaries, has an endowment worth billions and would owe the city of New Haven as much as 100 million dollars a year of its property was actually taxed. Many aren't aware that New Haven is a poor city, and that money is badly needed to address distressed schools, crime and drug problems. Money not paid by Yale ends up being money drawn from the rest of the city. As Milton Friedman often stated, there is almost no justification in taxing the poor to give to the rich and upper middle class.

Of course, like many issues concerning the distribution of wealth and public benefits, a lot of your opinion about the Ivy League depends on your personal perspective.  This makes it very much a glass half full, glass half empty issue. Without a doubt, I am a pure product of this system. Yale transformed me in an uncountable number of ways, and my life is profoundly different than that of my peers in Wyoming. And for each of these differences, I am much better off.

This is the heart of J.D. Chapman's response to Deresiewicz. For those people who are able to take advantage of the system's benefits, almost nothing has the same transformative power as an Ivy League education.

One of Deresiewicz's central contentions, that students at elite institutions are particularly emotionally dislocated and wayward, is presented with two kinds of evidence. The first is anecdotal and personal with no counter-examples of peers from lower profile institutions, or from outside of higher education altogether. The second is a glancing mention of what I assume was the survey "The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010," which did not appear to disaggregate data by selectivity at all. ("A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history," Deresiewicz writes.) One wonders, does he know other 18-21 year olds? My own experience suggests that thoughtful, curious people in this age group are widely prone to confused self-loathing no matter where they are.

Most of my friends today are not Ivy League graduates. They are, like most middle class people in America not in the trades, graduates of lower-profile liberal arts colleges and state universities. The ones with whom I have discussed this article are unanimous on that last point: They all felt like they were wandering around with no clear direction at that age and object to the premise that that is a special property of the Ivy Leaguer. They are also unanimous on this point: they are proud of their educations, but do not conclude from that pride that an Ivy League education is “overrated” in comparison.

I agree with Deresiewicz that liberal arts colleges like Sarah Lawrence and Reed are uniquely positioned to nurture and challenge students, and I champion them when I can. I don’t believe the Ivies are for every bright kid, and I have occasionally counseled students capable of admission to them to favor other options. And I agree that class lines are hardening in dangerous ways; the Ivies have too much money and power; and meritocracy is a delusion. That does not mean that an Ivy League diploma isn’t valuable, especially for someone whose family has no history of access to elite careers like teaching at Yale or writing for The New Republic. It means that it is valuable. Whether it should be is another discussion altogether.

During a time of increasing class disparity, the Ivies are both institutions that cater to the elite and offer some bit of meritocracy. Those that criticize the Ivies believe that we should some much more of the latter function and a lot less of the former. They believe that the inequality gap is big enough already. We would hope that the criticism of Yale would make the admissions process much more fair in the end. In the same way, we hope that people can still get ahead despite the chasm between the elite and everyone else in America. Both of those things might not be possible anymore, but it's a credit to our innate values and aspirations that we dream for something else.

This gets to the heart of Americans' difficulty in addressing the overall problem of inequality, one that John Oliver did a brilliant job of addressing recently. Americans, without question, all believe that we all have a real shot of getting rich one day. It is part of the national fantasy, and it is one of our most endearing traits. This dream, by and large, is not true, but we can't help but cheer at the incredibly few people who actually make it.

No metaphor captures this better than the major lotteries, which are terrible fiscal policies that amount to little more than a tax on the poor that also justifies cutting services. It is hard to deny the harm, but Americans love the lottery! And there is always a big emotional buildup whenever the jackpots get especially large. We get so excited about winning even though we know, as a nearly irrefutable fact, that we won't win!

Looking at the real lottery or its educational counterpart, Harvard,  means addressing fundamental philosophical questions about ourselves and our nation. Do we justify the existence of a purely elitist institution because there's an incredibly slim chance that a few poor kids might sneak in? Do we stop ourselves from addressing the huge problems of income inequality because we can't help but dream about someday, somehow, ending up on the winning side of the divide? There aren't easy questions here, but we cannot fully grapple with the state of our nation in the 21st century without trying to tackle them.

What Comes Next Ukraine? A Debate (1)

The downing of flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine is the type of tragedy that has the potential to completely reshape the West's involvement in the ongoing crisis. The outrage in England and Amsterdam is palpable, and even normally reticent countries like Germany seem to have adopted a much more aggressive attitude towards Russia over the last week. 

These are the kind of singular moments that demand we once again take stock of our knowledge of the events on the ground. It's an excellent time to ask ourselves, what comes next? Does a tragedy of this scale lead to a resolution of the rebellion or is it only another step in a dangerous environment that is quickly escalating? 

Since forecasting is inevitably an exercise in speculation,  it is a disservice to any reader to present only one side of the argument. So, I'll offer both. This article will present my case for why I believe that this is the herald of the beginning of the end. I'll follow it with an argument for why the situation might only become more dangerous in the coming weeks.

I don't believe that these arguments are fully mutually exclusive. Hopefully, seeing a more nuanced presentation of this issue will give readers room to synthesize their own opinions about what might happen and why.

The Price We Pay

In light of my previous article on the imminent end to the conflict in Ukraine, I think it's worthwhile to take a moment, complicate that conclusion and and remind ourselves of everything that's brought the Ukrainian crisis to this point. I'll say that there's about a 60 percent, maybe 70 percent chance that this is the beginning of the end. I have no idea how Europe can continue to sit on the sidelines after the death of so many Western European civilians, and the case against the Russian military only grows stronger each day.

The Guardian Gives Us a Chance to Play With Relative Risks

A post in The Guardian about black imprisonment in Britain offers this shocking, headline-grabbing statistic. To quote,

Evidence of this damaged relationship can be found in the commission's report. On the streets, black people were subjected to what the report describes as an "excess" of 145,000 stop and searches in 2008. It notes that black people constitute less than 3% of the population, yet made up 15% of people stopped by police.

The commission found that five times more black people than white people per head of population in England and Wales are imprisoned. The ethnic minority prison population has doubled in a decade – from 11,332 in 1998 to 22,421 in 2008. Over a similar period, the overall number of prisoners rose by less than two thirds. The commission says that the total number of people behind bars accelerated in the last decade despite "a similar number of crimes being reported to the police as in the early 1990s … the volume of indictable offences has fallen over this time".

If you were willing to skip over the correction at the beginning of the article, this can lead someone to quickly conclude that "The United Kingdom incarcerates 75% more black people proportionally than the United States." What are we to make of that? What are we to make of The Guardian's retraction?