Crime and Punishment

Like most Americans, I've spent the last few days thinking long and hard about violence in America, especially for the strange mix of factors that result in our multifaceted form of state-sponsored and state-condoned violence. I do not wish George Zimmerman ill will, and part of me is happy that he does not have to visit the hell of American prisons. As Ta-Nehisi Coats so eloquently explains, the injustice of Trayvon Martin's murder has less to do with a not guilty verdict and much more to do with a systematic assault on a broad segment of Americans:

The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class. The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.

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We have spent much of this year outlining the ways in which American policy has placed black people outside of the law. We are now being told that after having pursued such policies for 200 years, after codifying violence in slavery, after a people conceived in mass rape, after permitting the disenfranchisement of black people through violence, after Draft riots, after white-lines, white leagues, and red shirts, after terrorism, after standing aside for the better reduction of Rosewood and the improvement of Tulsa, after the coup d'etat in Wilmington, after Airport Homes and Cicero, after Ossian Sweet, after Arthur Lee McDuffie, after Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo and Eleanor Bumpers, after Kathryn Johnston and the Danziger Bridge, that there are no ill effects, that we are pure, that we are just, that we are clean. Our sense of self is incredible. We believe ourselves to have inherited all of Jefferson's love of freedom, but none of his affection for white supremacy.
 
You should not be troubled that George Zimmerman "got away" with the killing of Trayvon Martin, you should be troubled that you live in a country that ensures that Trayvon Martin will happen. Trayvon Martin is happening again in Florida. Right now.

Ta-Nehisi's post is just beautiful. Everyone should read it. Even better, it leads us in a much more important and serious direction. Injustice in America is broad and systematic. Its malfunction is emblematic of flaws existing throughout American society today. It shows up in the shooting of teenagers, in pop culture conceptions of black crime, and most importantly, in the mass incarceration of young black men. The scale of this, intentionally silent form of oppression is shocking. Adam Gopnik provides the statistics in The New Yorker:

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncooperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

If we wish to better understand these problems, the best place to turn is William Stuntz's posthumously published masterpiece, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Stuntz forcefully explains that the fundamental problem with the criminal justice system is that it is no longer democratic. Policing and jurisprudence have become entirely divorced from the communities that actually need these services. This is why you have Stop Snitching campaigns and the like, since the relationship is fully adversarial. People from one community are exercising their political/social power over another, to the detriment of all involved. You fix this problem by getting the community more involved with its own criminal justice system and external actors more involved with the community.

I do understand that drive for national unity, but it's important to recognize diversity too. No one says a white person from the suburbs can't be a cop. But who are we kidding? A deficit of white police officers, white lawyers and white judges from the suburbs is not exactly a problem facing urban/ ethnic communities.

The opposite is true. We have people who act like police work is like soldiering because they come from outside the community with hostile attitudes. Even worse, they're entering these communities with military style tactics and weaponry to engage in some bizarre form of urban warfare. And we see the effects. Black people, usually from urban areas, are punished, brutally, at rates astronomically higher than whites that commit similar crimes. No doubt that it's easier from a white cop to empathize with a drunk white teenager than a black one found in a similar situation.

Justice Stevens talks about the effectiveness of community-driven police work in his review of Stuntz's book, where he compares the different policing provided to European immigrants as opposed to those received by African Americans moving north.

Stuntz believes that two enormous migrations that led to crime waves largely define the history of crime and punishment in the United States. The first occurred during the seventy years preceding World War I when over 30 million Europeans came to America and settled primarily in cities in the industrial Northeast. The second occurred during the first two thirds of the twentieth century when seven million blacks left the rural South and moved into the same cities. To put simply Stuntz’s description of the central difference between those two migrations: during the European migration, urban politics soon produced local police forces made up of officers who were similar to and resided among the residents of the areas they were protecting—Irish-Americans trusted Irish cops from the neighborhood to treat them fairly—whereas during the black migration, the white majorities living in suburban areas selected the prosecutors and police officers who enforced the law in black urban neighborhoods.

During the Gilded Age, crime was not controlled chiefly through punishment, but rather through local democracy and the network of relationships that supported it:

Police officers sometimes lived in the neighborhoods they patrolled, and had political ties to those neighborhoods through the ward bosses who represented their cities’ political machines. Those patrols happened on foot: officers, those whom they targeted, and those whom they served knew one another. Cops, crime victims, criminals, and the jurors who judged them—these were not wholly distinct communities; they overlapped, and the overlaps could be large.

Going back to these more democratic forms of justice will be difficult, but its not impossible. There are already movement in place with a strong determination to return democracy back to the lives of ordinary Americans. Like most movements, we won't see results right away, but efforts over the last two years have seen the formation of grassroots institution like Occupy matched with an unheralded distaste for American government.

Even better, we already have good evidence of how effective community-driven policing can become, thanks to New York. While there are still serious problems with things like stop and frisk, New York's increased police presence throughout the city have led to the largest drop in crime in American history. This has been accomplished without particularly meaningful changes in social or economic factors. New York's racial composition, poverty and even drug use has not changed substantially over the last twenty years, yet the city is now as safe as just about any other place in America. Most importantly, New York's incarceration rate has not really changed at all over the last twenty years. Prevention has meant focusing on misdemeanors instead of felonies, and it's doing a great job of keeping people out of prisons.

The most important lesson from Trayvon Martin's murder is that it does not have to be this way. We do not have to live in a society where state violence is the norm. America is unique both in its level of violent crime and its level of incarceration. It seems odd to think that stronger democratic institutions can address these issues simultaneously, but evidence from places like Jersey in the Channel Islands show that this is actually the case. Almost all of America's major public institutions are due for a good shaking. We know the way forward, the only job now is to act.

Nuclear is Green

Writing in The Guardian, George Monbiot has an excellent argument about why the Fukushima disaster has led him to strongly support nuclear power as a green technology. As he explains,

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.
 
Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

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Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.

But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power. Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast.

Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.

I also sympathize with a lot of the concerns of the greens, and I strongly believe that we must move to a more sustainable form of energy over the next several decades. To accomplish this lofty goal, we cannot ignore human nature. As Mark Lynas explains in The God Species, human beings evolved to depend fully on external energy sources for protection, comfort and food. Just as uranium serves a distinct purpose within the earth, so do trees, oil and coal. The latter three we burn prodigiously, upsetting the earth's carbon cycle and polluting the planet. These substances play a distinct role in the environment by capturing carbon and toxins beneath the earth. We've clearly upset it.

We can see how toxic petrocarbons are without even getting into global warming. Burning coal, for example, spreads mercury and other toxins all throughout the biosphere. We find fish and other animals all throughout the world who have been deformed and poisoned by the mercury released by coal. If you don't care much about fish, look at China. The country is facing an epidemic of asthma and other respiratory diseases due mostly to its massive reliance on coal.

Given the damage that our energy reliance has already caused, we have little choice. We must accept our flaws as a species and find ways to make our energy reliance less dangerous. While images of atomic explosions would lead you to conclude otherwise, civilian nuclear technology is surprisingly safe. The UN commissioned report on the effects of Chernobyl, the largest nuclear disaster ever, lists the death toll around 9000. Other nuclear events have much lower casualty rates. According to the WHO, not a single person has died from radiation exposure since the Fukushima event, and at most, two people died because of Three-Mile Island. More people die of respiratory diseases related to pollution each week in China than the total number of people that died from these three major accidents combined. That's only one country, which goes to show the massive scale of the problem that we already face.

We need to adopt cleaner technologies, and we need to do it with a clear understanding of the risks. We have been willing to accept terrible costs for energy dependence because of people's inborn laziness to settle for the status quo. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for disaster. People are already contributing to the greatest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaurs, and our demands from the planet will only grow over the next century.

Yes, nuclear fallout is scary. This is a positive, since it makes us even more wary of the consequences of screwing up. The nuclear power industry has not had a single accident in the 30 years since Three Mile Island. This is a clear sign of diligence and the relatively strong grasp of a still imperfect technology. But even better nuclear technologies are coming very soon, and this includes the ability to recycle spent fuel from older reactors. Like it or not, these technologies will eventually be the key towards ending our dependence on carbon and finding a more healthy and sustainable relationship with our planet.

The Biggest Problem with the Surveillance State is that It Will Never Actually Work

One of the biggest oversights in the ongoing conversation about the surveillance state depends and the generally low level of public knowledge about statistics. Thankfully, Carl Bialik in The Wall Street Journal has taken the effort to help clear this up. As he explains,

Reports about the National Security Agency's program to collect vast amounts of data on personal electronic communications have created an uproar about the implications for privacy. But some statisticians and security experts have raised another objection: As a terror-fighting tool, it is highly inefficient and has some serious downsides.

Their reasoning: Any automated approach to spotting something rare necessarily produces false positives. That means for every correctly identified target, many more alarms that go off will prove to be incorrect. So if there are vastly more innocent people than would-be terrorists whose communications are monitored, even an extremely accurate test would ensnare many non-terrorists.

Kaiser Fung, in his book terrific book Numbers Rule Your World, points out that statisticians tend to be much more interested in variability than actual predictions. Analyzing data based on samples is fundamentally an imprecise science, and statisticians have diligently worked to formalize a system of expression uncertainty. Take an introduction to statistics class, and almost half of your time will be taken up by calculating variance, standard deviations, variance and confidence intervals. All of these are simply ways of saying how much (and how little) you actually know.

This obsession with variance matters because statistical inference is not actually built around binary outcomes. In fact, any projection or estimate contains four possible outcomes: a true positive (correctly guessing something is there), true negative (correctly guessing that something isn't there), false positive (saying something is there when it isn't) and false negative (saying something is there when it isn't). The latter two are labeled type 1 and type 2 errors. While better algorithms and more data can, to an extent, reduce the total number of errors, it is essentially impossible to be perfectly accurate. Instead, a statistician must always accept a trade off between false positives and false negatives. Getting rid of one means accepting the greater prevalence of the other.

Why does this matter? Terrorism is an inherently rare activity and terrorists are very rare among any population. This makes it extremely difficult to establish any robust model for identifying terrorist activity within communication data. Moreover, the incentive system for an NSA agent is badly stacked against false negatives. Let one suspected terrorist go, and you have another 9/11 on your hands (or so they're all trained to think).

In response, the data mining algorithms used by PRISM have to be extremely large. Because reducing false negatives is so important, a basic Bayesian model developed by Corey Chivers estimates that there will be about 10,000 false positives for every successfully identified piece of terrorism-related communication. The government has tried to trot out a handful of terrorist plots that they've interfered with as evidence of the effectiveness of these broad surveillance tactics. For the statistician, this is a tacit admission from the government that hundreds of thousands of Americans have had their constitutionally-protected civil liberties shockingly violated by agents engaged in a hopeless wild goose chase.

The fundamental case against torture, past ethics and human rights, is that it simply does not work. It has never proven to be an effective intelligence gathering tool. Even worse, we have lapsed towards torture despite the fact that much more humane tactics have proven to be incredibly productive.

The case against the surveillance state is exactly the same. Comprehensive data collection accompanied with data mining algorithms is a terrible way to actually investigate and pursue terrorists. Agents will spend most of their time dealing with false positives. At the same time, massive direct costs will be incurred by maintaining such an elaborate system and even larger indirect costs will amount from the systematic violation of civil liberties.

This isn't a particularly novel concept, as the Cato Institute was already tearing apart the fundamentally flawed ideas behind mass surveillance seven years ago. As Jeff Jonas and Jim Harper wrote in 2006,

Though data mining has many valuable uses, it is not well suited to the terrorist discovery problem. It would be unfortunate if data mining for terrorism discovery had currency within national security, law enforcement, and technology circles because pursuing this use of data mining would waste taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, and misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national security community.

What the 9/11 story most clearly calls for is a sharper focus on the part of our national security agencies—their focus had undoubtedly sharpened by the end of the day on September 11, 2001—along with the ability to efficiently locate, access, and aggregate information about specific suspects.

Living with terrorism means accepting living in a world that is fundamentally unpredictable and having the courage to face the day knowing that something bad might happen, no matter how hard you try and stop it. There will never be a surveillance system fine tuned enough to actually accomplish what the government wants from PRISM. Instead, a much different approach is necessary: one that modestly accepts our ability to control the world and holds the value of personal sovereignty to the highest degree.

Both at home and abroad, the actions of the US government violate these basic precepts. There is little regard for the well-being of American and foreign citizens, and a hopelessly irrational obsession with trying to control the uncontrollable. A drastically more modest approach has the potential to both reaffirm the importance of human rights and offer the greater opportunity for meaningful security. It's badly needed.

Four Economic Lessons Courtesy of Dorian Electra

Dorian Electra is Youtube pop star who devotes most of her efforts to promoting Austrian Economics. Awhile back, she posted a video called "FA$T CA$H: Easy Credit & the Economic Crash," which unexpectedly turns out to be a useful teaching tool for some fundamental economic theories. You can check it out below.

Dorian seems like a nice enough girl, and I apologize in advance for holding her up as a representative of a whole body of thought. While this isn't very fair (or nice on my part), I think it is very useful to see how her video illustrates public knowledge of economics and the current debate over monetary and fiscal policy. People like Dorian try to create an economic framework based entirely on their (limited) understanding of "economic crashes." This might be because these ideas are inherently sexier than other economics topic (three cheers for AD-AS!!! no one?). But it also has a lot to do with how "nationally screwing up" is a much more relatable story. We can imagine the debtor that gets in over his head. It's harder to understand more specific macroeconomic problems.

But proper economic management is a much broader subject than crashes, and economic recovery has very little to do with what happened before. Even if (and I'm not conceding that point yet) a "fast cash bubble" was the sole cause of the crisis, it should not immediately stop us from doing similar things to encourage a recovery, especially since fiscal and monetary stimulus are proven solutions to a demand-side shock.

Saying "crash, crash, crash" when you want to "cut, cut, cut" is like a doctor who won't treat your cancer because you were a smoker. Fixing the disease and solving its cause are fundamentally independent problems. That's lesson one.

This is lesson two: there is no economic problem so important that it takes precedence over getting back to full employment. To get to that point you need deficit spending and currency devaluation. The latter can come through higher inflation (which I've talked about before, and is more suitable to big economies) or actual exchange-rate manipulation (the Iceland scenario, which you can do if you're small, open and control your own currency). At this point, especially after the Reinhart-Rogoff meltdown, there is almost no debate about this point. There also is no evidence over the last five years of a country returning to macroeconomic stability using any other set of policies.

No matter which monetary path you choose, the end goal is to get people back to work as quick as possible and encourage hard work. The things you could buy before the collapse are harder to get now (especially imports), but you're all working to a solution together. You'll eventually have to pay more taxes too, which sucks. But as long as everyone keeps working, you'll eventually get out of it.

People often  want to make economics into the broad morality play. Even though this is generally a big mistake, there is a bit to think about here. The austerian solution focuses all of the suffering of its policies among the poor and disenfranchised. No rich German is bothered much by the European crisis. On the other hand, a solution that returns to full employment through fiscal and monetary stimulus forces everyone to share the burden of recovery. This is important for the institutions that maintain the long-term well being of a society.

Lesson three is that not all economic problems are the same. A whole bunch of things that led into the crisis, and they continue to plague Europe. This includes the challenges with adopting the Euro, the various housing bubbles, the risk of complex financial instruments (like derivatives), inefficiencies in European labor markets and regulatory challenges facing those countries. Obviously, austerity can't be the solution to all of them. In fact, the euro, for example, has been one of the chief causes of austerity on the periphery. Germany won't accept higher inflation, Greece can't devalue on its own, so they get forced into a debtor's prison version of policy where European bureaucrats decide their budget for them.  

Part of the problem with making broad arguments, as Dorian does, is that it reflects a limited understanding of relevant issues. This is true for most people, no fault there. Nonetheless, even the more informed argument against stimulus-based recovery has fundamental problems. Many conservatives look at something like the economic problems of the 80's and then blindly assume that the actions of the Volcker Fed somehow stop us from using loose monetary policy now. This is obviously absurd. Economic problems can have many sources, just as your car can suffer from many different problems. A solution for one problem might not be the same for the other.

So yes, after Europe gets back to full employment (whenever that will be) there will be other things to address (remember lesson two: full employment comes first). Complex financial instruments need more transparency, as does the actions of mortgage originators and intermediaries (the primary actors in the housing bubble that you cite).

Austrian solutions might be suitable to certain aspects of labor markets and other supply-side problems facing Europe, but they're not alone. More importantly, though, is solving a fundamental Austrian myth when we get to the point of trying to address them. I'll let Matt Yglesias explain:

Rich people who don't like paying taxes don't like the idea of macroeconomic stabilization policy. That's because it'd convenient for them if the market economy could be not just a practical tool for allocating goods, but an moral framework imbued with deep ethical significance.
 
And that, in turn, is an idea that sits oddly with the concept that actually you have a bunch of bureaucrats in the Federal Reserve System making the economy plug along. So rich guys indulge fantasies of shifting back to a gold standard or something else that would restore divine right to the monetary system. But beyond that, the central banker they like best is the central banker who's most obscure. Conventional monetary policy was something economists and bond traders paid attention to, but nobody else. Alan Greenspan raising or cutting rates by 25 basis points wasn't a big spectacle. Since the easing (or tightening) was based on interest-rate targeting rather than quantitative monetary creation, you didn't get articles about "printing money". It was all just there in the background. 

Ben Bernanke is as if the Wizard of Oz stepped forward from behind the curtain and turned out to be a really powerful wizard. The whole market economy turns out to be an elaborately orchestrated affair, with deep involvement by government central planners who weigh a variety of situations before determining outcomes. In that kind of world, there may still be reasons to eschew certain kinds of tax hikes. But they're practical, pragmatic reasons. They're not moral reasons, in which taxes violate the natural hierarchy of the market because there clearly is no such hierarchy.

It's probably very uncomfortable for people to recognize that the success or failure of a national economy comes down the work of a few bureaucrats. It's probably very uncomfortable to realize the money is fundamentally worthless too. Unfortunately, there's no way to make this more palatable. Economic policy has to be an active and progressive force, since an economy is an inherently managed venture. The Austrians, and more broadly austerity pundits in general, fail to address so many problems because they cannot recognize this fact. And that's lesson four. 

On the Need for Additional Evidence

There is an interesting new report from the University of Waterloo that claims Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are the chief cause of global warming since the 1970s. It was published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B  last week. As phys.org explains,

CFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now shows that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

"Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed to global warming. But we have observed data going back to the Industrial Revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong," said Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, biology and chemistry in Waterloo's Faculty of Science. "In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming."

"Most conventional theories expect that global temperatures will continue to increase as CO2 levels continue to rise, as they have done since 1850. What's striking is that since 2002, global temperatures have actually declined – matching a decline in CFCs in the atmosphere," Professor Lu said. "My calculations of CFC greenhouse effect show that there was global warming by about 0.6 °C from 1950 to 2002, but the earth has actually cooled since 2002. The cooling trend is set to continue for the next 50-70 years as the amount of CFCs in the atmosphere continues to decline."

I might not be the most qualified person to criticize Dr. Lu's work, but I do think we should not jump to conclusions right away. The carbon/ temperature record goes back a long time, tens of thousands of years if we are referring to ice cores.With that much data, it's fair to say that the very strong correlation between carbon and temperature can be assumed to continue to the future. But even with that much data, establishing a causal basis can be very difficult. Since we can't run control experiments, we'll almost always have enough uncertainty in the data to keep climate denier websites busy for decades.

The black line represents a three-year moving average. Data from the NOAA, which is available here.

Considering this challenge, I find it very presumptuous to go that far against consensus based on only 10 years' worth of deviation from the original trend. The argument for CFCs is based entirely on the fact that temperatures have not risen as quickly as CO2 levels in the last decade, even though it remains much hotter than any period before it. Considering measurement challenges and the huge number of almost random processes that influence weather (just ask Lorenz about that), it seems presumptuous, to say the least, to claim that CFCs are the only compounds that matter. There's just too much that we don't understand to make that claim with that little of evidence.

To be fair, I'm not claiming that CFCs don't matter in this debate. I only want to recommend caution about extreme claims. A much older report from the US Environmental Protection Agency did say CFCs were responsible for about 15 percent of global warming. They could also play a strong role in the less-than-expected recent rise in temperatures. So could volcanoes, so could a lot of other things.

So what's really going here? Academics have strong incentives to make almost absurd claims, since it helps them get published, and it generates references. While this can be annoying on a case by case basis, the overall scientific discourse benefits from the trolls as it forces people to expand their cases and move the debate forward.  It will take a lot to overturn consensus at this point, since about 97 percent of scientists in a recent survey agree on the mechanism and the effect. As readers of scientific literature, wish should keep this in mind. Prior beliefs should be adjusted only when there is substantial evidence to change course. So far with CFCs and global warming, we're not there yet.

Improving Government

Cass Sunstein, Obama's former regulation czar who was previously best known for his work on nudges with Richard Thaler, is out with a new book. He previews it at the Brookings Institute.

Although Glenn Beck might think otherwise, Sunstein has a very important and very useful philosophy for the effective operation of government. It can be broken apart into a couple of key positions. First, government is necessary and useful, but it is inevitably flawed. Second, citizens' relationship to the government is improved when government's impact is simplified (not necessarily lessened), although that might demand greater organizational complexity. Third, a simple and effective government is exemplified by supporting proper choices and encouraging freedom, instead of applying a heavy hand.

The most important feature of this platform is that it provides for on effective ongoing debate about how government should operate. Active citizens should see flaws in how government operates, and this can be complemented by a wide variety of opinions on how to fix them. Sunstein's commitment to this process is clear in his promotion of "regulatory moneyball," quantitative indicators of the impact of regulatory regimes. Given better assessments of the results of different decisions, we can better debate the appropriate trade offs that we're willing to make.

The only harmful attitude in this debate is an assumption that any active regulatory system will either be perfect or useless. I have my own biases against absenteeism, but I also hate the idea forced on us by current Congressional inaction that we should just pass a couple laws and be done with it. And if passing a law wouldn't immediately solve the problem, we should just abandon trying. It's so intellectually lazy that it's infuriating.

I think this attitude feeds into the stupid myth about the length of bills. Even simple rules might need specific definition, and that takes work. It's much better for everyone than a world filled with ambiguity and confusion because things weren't explained well. To get to something is fundamentally simple for citizens, there might be a ton of complexity in governmental operations.

To make this actually work, we need people constantly pointing out the problems with current regulations and working to revise them for the better. The more libertarian side of the argument (when it's not lazy and just frothing at the mouth over "evil" government), is very useful. To belabor the point, Cass Sunstein is the perfect example here. He, along with co-author Richard Thaler, is a strong proponent of minimalism , but he uses this philosophy to pragmatic ends. This is why their first book together, Nudge, was all about striking the appropriate balance to find "libertarian paternalism."

I would be a lot more interested in the right's arguments about regulation if they were actually focused on improving government. The process of self-governance is always hard and imperfect, especially when a part of society is determined to undermine it. If only we could just get past that, we would all be better. Unfortunately, it seems like we still have a very long way to go.

Oh, and read Simpler. Cass is the boss.

Promoting Marriage is a Conservative Issue. Period.

Rob Portman's recent turn towards supporting gay marriage is further indication of the coming change of the GOP. While there will be bumps along the way, it's obvious that there's already an intellectual framework in place from moderates within the party. Take, for example, Jon Huntsman's recent article in The American Conservative. As he writes,

It’s difficult to get people even to consider your reform ideas if they think, with good reason, you don’t like or respect them. Building a winning coalition to tackle the looming fiscal and trust deficits will be impossible if we continue to alienate broad segments of the population. We must be happy warriors who refuse to tolerate those who want Hispanic votes but not Hispanic neighbors. We should applaud states that lead on reforming drug policy. And, consistent with the Republican Party’s origins, we must demand equality under the law for all Americans.

While serving as governor of Utah, I pushed for civil unions and expanded reciprocal benefits for gay citizens. I did so not because of political pressure—indeed, at the time 70 percent of Utahns were opposed—but because as governor my role was to work for everybody, even those who didn’t have access to a powerful lobby. Civil unions, I believed, were a practical step that would bring all citizens more fully into the fabric of a state they already were—and always had been—a part of.

That was four years ago. Today we have an opportunity to do more: conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry. I’ve been married for 29 years. My marriage has been the greatest joy of my life. There is nothing conservative about denying other Americans the ability to forge that same relationship with the person they love.

Liberals might scoff at the idea of changing the Republican Party's policies simply for the sake of attracting more votes, but this is much more common than our partisan political landscape when lead us to believe. Fiorini's research, for example, points out that that ideological positions tend to be quite flexible. This shouldn't surprise anyone, since America isn't that ideological to begin with. The members of the two main parties are sorting into more clearly defined groups, not becoming more extreme. While the actual effect on Congress is slightly different, its obvious that the mainstream discussion about "polarization" is clearly off the mark.

I think identity issues could remain separate from this sorting process. We already have a prominent group of gay Republicans in Washington, proving that gayness is not a prohibiting factor for having strong conservative inclinations. Huntsman's gutsy statements deserve accolades because he shows that Republicans can focus on these factors and stop being a party defined by a narrow set minority interests: those of old, religious, wealthy white men. I think our political process will be substantially improved once this happens, and I don't think a wave of moderation is all that far away. Enough influential people (including guys like Karl Rove) have seen that firebrand conservatism is a huge liability for any major election. The process is not all that different from what Democrats did in the 80's.

The agent of all this change is vote chasing. Deride it all you want, but a politician's primary job is to get people to vote for him. They can't stay employed otherwise. Competition has the added benefit of making politicians more responsive to the demands to the public. Political scientists have seen this a lot already. The ideology of parties and politicians can be successfully shaped by forces that can get them elected. In the past, private and public organizations - businesses, unions and advocacy groups - did most of that work. The more participatory system provided by broad-based action committees show the way in the future.

We should obviously be worried when this process begins to favor uncompetitive practices (like gerrymandering) or when diversity of organizations diminishes (when was the last time you heard of an influential American union?). But at the same time, we should be celebrating politicians who are committed to getting as broad a number of supporters as possible, embodying the very best of the democratic process. Even better when they go against the broad positions established by their party, since it can lead to organizational change, increased competition and an even greater number of people included in the political process. And for that, I'm now a huge fan of Jon Huntsman.