Mad Social Scientist

US occupation forces close down a newspaper in Iraq. Glad to see that democracy is taking root so quickly.

I don't pretend to know much about Taiwanese politics, but the willingness of the apparent winner of Taiwan's recent elections to accede to a complete, court-administered recount should shame anyone proud of America's long democratic tradition. The situation is a bit different from the Florida dispute of 2000, but at least Taiwan's president recognizes what (I had presumed before 2000) all elected leaders in democracies recognize: elections are the key linkage between the ruler and the ruled, and must be held in the utmost regard. A disputed election needs to be resolved, regardless of expense, to ensure the legitimacy of government and the reality of rule by the people. A leader who openly tries to stop a recount in such a situation is simple anti-democratic, and deserves the scorn of all the electorate.

When these sentiments were aired in 2000, some of Bush's lackeys on the right crowed about the exorbitant cost of recounting (as if it compares to the massive sums in spending and taxes that can shift as a result of the outcome) and worried about the effects of "instability" during the recount (as if that compares to the instability of years of illegitimacy and distrust). But now it should be clear that American elections still matter. Some voters used to more or less competant and faithful governments convinced themselves that it didn't much matter who won in 2000.

Now everyone should know that people of stunning incompetence and bad faith can gain power, even in a centuries-old republic. Thousands of lives and trillions of dollars hang in the balance every fourth November. Shouldn't the adults be in charge of these decisions? And shouldn't every effort be made to ensure the polls are fair and accurate?

A cutting post on the Bushies pathological efforts to hide the truth on 9/11, and an article on the long list of Bush officials who have resigned, criticized Bush, and been smeared. To top it off, he deduces rather neatly that Bush personally must have lied about meeting with Clarke.

Regarding Sen Graham's proposal to open all the documents and let the chips fall where they may; how about double or nothing: if Clarke is lying, try him for perjury. If Bush is hiding the truth, impeach him for leading us into war on false pretenses. Bring it on.

Edward Tufte famously hates powerpoint for its "cognitive style"---choppy bulleted lists in place of subtle, persuasive prose. The critique has led to some parodies; this is one of the best I've seen (click thru to the end).

Senate Dems promise to block all judicial nominations unless Bush promises to foreswear recess appointments (NYT).

The Bush admin has a lot of trouble understanding priorities. Politicians in general find it expedient to promise voters they can have their cake and eat it, too. But I ordinarily don't blame them too much, since the voters practically demand these sorts of impossible promises. But even more than usual, the Bush admin acts like it can be all things to all people: compassionate and conservative; tax cutting, spending increasing, and deficit reducing; for the best science on the environment and stem cells, yet also for whatever the polluters and religious right want.

They've been playing this game on foreign policy too: wanting to build Reagan's impossible dream of missile defense, while also focusing on the war on terror, rebuilding Iraq, containing North Korea, etc. It can't be done, as 49 generals came forward to say today. Making one thing a priority means putting others on the backburner. Terrorism was on the back burner before 9/11, and unbelievably, it's still there.

One thing that's clear from the Clarke affair is that the Bush admin is secretive only when it suits their political interests, and not for the sake of national security. Hence they released Valerie Plame's identity to (clumsily) smear her husband, and now they release background briefings, identify Clarke as author of anonymous memos, and plan to release classified Congressional testimony, all to attack an opponent.

I'm not a huge believer in secrecy myself; I tend to think openness allows for scrutiny and accountability, while secrecy is all to easy to extend to cover up incompetence and malfeasance. For example, if we knew more about the CIA budget, we could better judge whether it was using its resources efficiently (and it almost certainly is one of the least efficient agencies). Secrecy has its uses: no one is suggesting we should reveal our agents, our contacts, our information gathering sources, military plans, and knowledge of other's plans. But internal political documents grow stale after awhile, and the only reason to hide them in the end is to protect their creators from the wrath of the public.

But instead, the Bush admin is in full slime mode, releasing info only to damage its enemies, not to establish its side of the argument. Is there anything they could say, if they had the guts? Brad DeLong takes a stab at how Condi Rice might exlpain herself to Congress, if she were willing to testify. It's much better than anything the admin has come up with, though it still doesn't answer the Iraq obsession critique.

An Army report notes that the suicide rate among GIs in Iraq is 17.3 per 100,000, compared with the overall service average of 12.8 per 100,000 last year. NYT has run this story twice, each time implying that this is a "much higher rate". While I take suicide very seriously, this claim is quite overstated. There were 23 suicides in Iraq. Under the overall service rate, we would have expected 17. Maybe the difference is just random variation---suicides are complicated events, and we don't know what personal anguish these soldiers were under. Or maybe its actually a low figure, considering the circumstances. The NYT article adds that "[i]n one startling finding, in the survey of 756 soldiers late last summer, 52 percent of them said their personal morale was low or very low, and 72 percent said their whole unit's morale was that bad. Most of those surveyed had been in combat." I don't know what the historical relationship between morale and suicide is, but this doesn't sound like Exhibit A against the war. That would be the more than 500 soldiers killed.

David Corn's account of Bush's performance at the press dinner last night:

It's standard fare humor. Bush says he is preparing for a tough election fight; then on the large video screens a picture flashes showing him wearing a boxing robe while sitting at his desk. Bush notes he spends "a lot of time on the phone listening to our European allies." Then we see a photo of him on the phone with a finger in his ear. There were funny bits about Skull and Bones, his mother, and Dick Cheney. But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere."

The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.

Disapproval must have registered upon my face, for one of my tablemates said, "Come on, David, this is funny." I wanted to reply, Over 500 Americans and literally countless Iraqis are dead because of a war that was supposedly fought to find weapons of mass destruction, and Bush is joking about it.

full column

As Texans should know, Bush has always had a sick sense of humor, and in particular seems to take the power of life and death very lightly.

Most people I've read on the web consider Clarke's book and testimony "devastating", "damaging", and a "KO" to Bush. They also note that the general message isn't news; we always knew Bush wasn't really that effective on terrorism. The administration itself hasn't come back with much of a rebuttal, and essentially no evidence to counter Clarke's. But some people don't seem to get the relevance of what the Bush admin was doing before 9/11 (since they "probably couldn't have prevented the attacks"), or after the war in Afghanistan (since they were just going after "more terrorists" in Iraq). But the main implication of Clarke's testimony is that Bush & co have never committed to fight al-Qaeda but instead folded the al-Qaeda threat into their pre-existing policy priorities.

Think of three phases of the Bush administration. According to Clarke, before 9/11, the Bush people didn't take al-Qaeda seriously enough to dedicate high level attention to it. Instead, they wanted a "comprehensive" strategy for terrorism and related issues (even the Afghan opium trade), and were willing to put off dealing with al-Qaeda until it was ready. Saletan (in an excellent column) quotes the 9/11 hearings:

Roemer: So does this slow the process down to go to the deputies rather than to the principals or a small group as you had previously done?

Clarke: It slowed it down enormously, by months. … When the deputies committee did meet, it took the issue of al-Qaida as part of a cluster of policy issues, including nuclear proliferation in South Asia, democratization in Pakistan, how to treat the various problems, including narcotics and other problems in Afghanistan, and launched on a series of deputies meetings extending over several months to address al-Qaida in the context of all of those interrelated issues. … So we were ready for a principals meeting in July. But the principals' calendar was full, and then they went on vacation, many of them, in August. So we couldn't meet in August, and therefore the principals met in September.

This quote is particularly revealing: if al-Qaeda or even the bundled terrorism issue really mattered to the admin, if it were really seen as urgent, they would have made time. But instead, they focused on the agenda they brought into the White House, especially missile defense against a non-existent ballistic missile threat and bringing down the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Would a different course---for example, that followed by Clinton, and presumably by a hypothetical Gore admin--have prevented 9/11? Probably not, but who knows? As Saletan points out, the attacks wouldn't have been stopped by the right plan, but by the right process: the different agencies talking to each other, sharing info, and "shaking the tree" for intelligence. If the cabinet made al-Qaeda a high priority, maybe the FBI would have shuffled up info about suspicious flight students; maybe they would have called up Marwan. Or maybe not. But it's clear in hindsight the Bush people didn't get it before 9/11.

But then, a lot of us didn't. So what did they learn after 9/11? According to Clarke, appallingly little. Bush, Rumsfield, and Wolfowitz first instinct was to explot 9/11 to push a prior policy priority, invading Iraq. (This is the same trick they used on the domestic side to push tax cuts when the economy went south.) According to Clarke, they had to be shouted into focusing on al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. I have no doubt a Gore admin would have gone after al-Qaeda immediately; Gore himself immediately decided it was an al-Qaeda attack on hearing the news.

A week after 9/11, Bush promised to go after the perpetrators of 9/11 and destroy their organization. Acknowledging al-Qaeda lurked in many countries, the administration vowed to keep them on the run, never letting them pause to breathe or plan another attack. The world was ready to support this mission, or at least stand back.

The real lesson of Clarke's testimony comes through in phase 3, after the fall of the Taliban, because the Bush administration did not follow through on its promises. With al-Qaeda damaged, on the run, but not destroyed, they pulled back resources to focus on Iraq (and, for that matter, missile defense, now a huge budget priority). They still didn't understand the real nature of the terrorist threat, preferring to focus on an old enemy with a well-known address. And they allowed al-Qaeda to regroup. As the attack on Spain shows, they haven't given up or changed, and our clumsy, inappropriate foreign policy has exposed us to attacks on our troops and civilians in Iraq, and have aided the recruitment drives of al-Qaeda and similar groups.

Has invading Iraq aided the war on terror or hindered it? I think the answer is obvious. If nothing else, it has stretched our forces to the limit, and precluded a really thorough purge of al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and other places (but this wasn't the Bush priority). Beyond that, it created a new front where there wasn't one: Iraq wasn't working with the terrorists, wasn't hiding significant terrorist groups, and didn't have any WMD to give to terrorists (plus there was excellent reason to doubt Iraq would ever give them WMD if they had them). The invasion itself furthers the crusader image of America bin Laden uses to recruit followers (a truly international effort would have avoided this, but Bush couldn't be bothered). And the Bushies made little effort to plan for the rebuilding of Iraq and its transformation to a democracy, so claims that this is a long run strategy to de-radicalize the Middle East pie-in-the-sky. The plan was to invade, consequences be damned.

Bush doesn't get it. We're not fighting states, or a tactic ("terrorism" itself), or "evil" (though our enemies may be). We're fighting groups that want to do as much damage to the US and allies as possible. We had a chance to smash the biggest group, but Bush and Cheney had other priorities.

And now they have the audacity to run as the candidates best able to fight terror. And dare to insult the opposition as soft on terror. Clarke has had such an impact because he was the first insider to show the reverse is true.

Newt Gingerich has an amusing column on the unemployment problem in today's Washington Post. I probably shouldn't dignify Newt with any attention whatsoever, but he has a couple of laugh lines.

The first merely reflects the bizzare wingnut assumption that if Bill Clinton did it, it must be wrong (the dangers of this idiotic heuristic are on display in the 9/11 hearings). Hence if Clinton somehow did something right (or at least that a winger agrees with), it is "ironic":

Ironically, President Bill Clinton understood that focusing on the future and on new jobs, new technologies and the creation of larger markets was the key to ensuring that our children and grandchildren would have the best, highest-paying jobs in the world...

Of course, I seem to recall Clinton being consistently pro-free trade, usually to the center-right on economic issues, and frequently criticized for "stealing" Republican policy proposals. Of course, today's Republicans don't seem to remember the principles they espoused way back in the 1990s, so why should they remember anyone else's?

The second laugh line is funnier, but a bit more complicated. America spends far more per capita on health care than any other industrialized country, yet has many millions more people lacking access to health care. With few exceptions, other countries provide health care publicly, more or less as a right of citizenship, and they have found that (because of peculiarities in the behavior of health care markets), a single government payer is much more effective at keeping costs down, especially administrative costs---this is an area where the private sector generates more bureaucracy than government. Of course, American right-wingers (but not their overseas compatriots) oppose government-provided health care. So you can imagine my surprise when Newt opines:

A new, better health care system would lower the cost of health care for employees so that it is no longer an obstacle when competing against or attracting foreign companies.

Is Newt going to propose radical changes in American health care to cut costs? Nope: he thinks we can sell our lousy delivery system to the rest of the world:

A truly first-rate health care system has the potential to be the largest single creator of high-value-added, high-paying jobs and the largest earner of foreign exchange as citizens abroad seek American expertise in health care delivery systems. This calls for an undersecretary for health in the Department of Commerce, whose job it would be to promote the American system of health care worldwide.

I doubt he'll find many takers; the American system is so reviled around the world that any government which "sought American expertise" in delivery of health care would rightly fear voter retribution. (Note the difference between medical technology and techniques, which are frequently shared among countries, and the American delivery system, which is not imitated: who else wants HMOs and endless insurance forms?).

Moreover, I thought Republicans were usually the first to point out that adding an undersecretary is hardly likely to solve a major policy problem. But then, this proposal isn't really meant to. What Newt really wants is for people to think Republicans even care about unemployment. Good luck.

Update: A picture of an earlier post of Newt's column, which WaPo managed to both screw up and improve at the same time

In a sharp statement today, Daschle criticized the Bush admin for threatening, firing, and/or publically smearing officials for being honest, doing their jobs, and serving the public. The list of victims is long (Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame, Richard Foster, and now Richard Clarke). And the parallel to the Nixon White House is getting sharper. What's worse, if Bush is elected, can you imagine the gaggle of yes-men he will select for his next cabinet, to avoid anyone from running to the press? If you think this administration is disconnected from reality...

If you want a running summary, with excerpts, of Clarke's book, you can find it here.

For a nifty diagram of anti-terror activities in 2001, click here.

The Bush response to Clarke has thus far been pathetic, self-damaging, and frankly hilarious; TPM catalogs it here, again here, and once again here. Doesn't seem like they have any real retorts at all to Clarke's charges.

The following stories could have been written anytime in the two years, but it took a presidential campaign and Richard Clarke's book (the foreign policy companion to Susskind/O'Neill) to get them attention:

WSJ dissects Bush account of his actions on 9/11

Ashcroft cut terror budget/focus before 9/11

NYT covers the frenzy

In a few weeks, will Bush regret his one-note re-election campaign? Will he realize that there is more to fighting terrorism than talking about it incessantly? Not a chance, but I'm starting to think voters may see through it.

Richard Clarke, anti-terrorism advisor to Clinton, and then Bush through September 11, says no.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml

This story should get a lot of attention and scrutiny. On domestic issues, Bush has a history of relabeling his old policies as appropriate for every new problem that comes up (tax cuts fix everything). It increasingly appears this is the case on foreign policy too (whatever the problem, invade Iraq and put up a missile shield). Here's Clarke:

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said "There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan" I thought he was joking.

Is it any wonder we have caught Saddam but not bin Laden?

Conservatives are having a very hard time justifying free trade these days, not because it cannot be justified, but because the toolkit of conservative economic arguments lacks the right tools for the job. It is fairly easy to convince yourself that free trade increases the amount of good and services produced, the simplest measure of aggregate material wealth (and let's for the moment assume that's what we care about; it will capture the jobs debate, if not the environmental, cultural, or defense sides of the trade debate). Economists all do this using a 19th century theory that still makes sense. But any reasonable version of this theory suggests that there will usually be (in each country) both winners and losers from trade---it's just that the winnings outweigh the losses (in each country).

A conservative must despair at this. They want to support a policy that increases average welfare, but how to sell it to the losers? They can muster only vague promises that "innovation" will somehow make everyone a winner, or that the solution is yet more "flexibility" (even though it is flexibility in markets that allows losers to lose). Hence the pathetic rhetorical efforts by the Bush administration to repair the damage from CEA chair Mankiw's support of outsourcing.

A liberal free trader, though, sees the solution in government. Simply skim off some of the winnings, and use them to compensate the losers. Then everyone ends up at least as well-off materially. This is hardly news, and many argue that this sort of compensation scheme to deal with the side-effects of trade underlies the large European welfare states. And it is true that most European countries maintain much higher levels of international trade than the US, without falling into chaos over the issue of trade and jobs.

But I'm writing this note not to rehash an old trade topic, but to point out how intellectually threadbare the conservative position has become. In Saturday's NYT, a former George H. W. Bush economic advisor grapples with the (related) fear that cheaper and cheaper machines will squeeze out labor:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/opinion/19BUCH.html

Buchholz should hit this out of the park: cheaper machines mean more production and material wealth. Find a way to share it, and everyone is better off. This is good news, at least for those who care primarily about material wealth (and I presume economic conservatives tend to be in this camp). But instead, Buchholz can do no better than to pathetically hope that

Human workers are not yet an endangered species. After all, somebody needs to operate the equipment — or at least turn on the coffee machine.

(An irony: would this conservative oppose innovation that made workers wholly redundant, despite the great increase in wealth and leisure this would provide? Is his defense of innovation undermined by too much innovation?)
Beyond this distinctly uncomforting statement, Buchholz' only policy recommendation is to cut the welfare state:

Congress could make it less costly to hire workers by reducing the amount an employer is required to contribute to Social Security taxes for new employees. Then managers might be less likely to view a job applicant like a walking bill from a collection agency.

This (silly) debate about cheap capital is fundamentally similar to the outsourcing of jobs debate: what do we do when a change in technology allows us to have more, but at the price of eliminating someone's job? The obvious answer is to compensate the loser---not to cut worker's benefits and social insurance. Virtually all industrialized countries have learned this lesson, and have preserved capitalist systems in the face of a massive increase in international trade. I don't think the US will become protectionist anytime soon, but I suspect the conservative recommendation to cut social insurance would only make protectionism more likely. And then we would all be worse off.

Rumsfield and the myth of an "immediate threat", courtesy of MoveOn.org

click here for video

Nothing new here, but a nice summary of what should be conventional wisdom, if people were paying attention:

For all the big talk, then, 9-11 appears to have changed nothing for the Bush administration. Their priorities remain the same as before the attacks: missile defense and Iraq, symptoms of a state-centric worldview incapable of really grasping global terrorism. The only difference was that they started saying their policies were directed at counter-terrorism. John Kerry was on the right track in his Feb. 27 national security speech: "I do not fault George Bush for doing too much in the War on Terror; I believe he's done too little." The sentiment is exactly correct, and needs to be repeated. Often. And with specifics.

http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2004/03/yglesias-m-03-16.html

Because I study central banks, people often ask me what I think of Alan Greenspan. Ordinarily, the head of the Fed does two things: leads a committee that sets interest rates, and oversees regulation of banks. On these duties, I have always said Greenspan has done an above average job.

But Greenspan has a habit of meddling in other parts of the economy where he has no official capacity, leveraging people's esteem for his good work on monetary policy to influence the budget. Here, Greenspan's intervention has been disastrous in recent years. He applied decisive support to Bush's tax cuts with the absurd warning that without them, the national debt would become dangerously *small*. Now, because the debt is growing dangerously large, he wants to cut Social Security---a program on
which he should little or no say in the first place.

I am outraged by Greenspan's behavior, and the following column from Paul Krugman, perhaps my favorite economist, captures this perfectly.

The traditional definition of chutzpah says it's when you murder your parents, then plead for clemency because you're an orphan. Alan Greenspan has chutzpah.

Last week Mr. Greenspan warned of the dangers posed by budget deficits. But even though the main cause of deficits is plunging revenue — the federal government's tax take is now at its lowest level as a share of the economy since 1950 — he opposes any effort to restore recent revenue losses. Instead, he supports the Bush administration's plan to make its tax cuts permanent, and calls for cuts in Social Security benefits.

Yet three years ago Mr. Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes, warning that otherwise the federal government would run excessive surpluses. He assured Congress that those tax cuts would not endanger future Social Security benefits. And last year he declined to stand in the way of another round of deficit-creating tax cuts.

But wait — it gets worse.

http://www.pkarchive.org/column/030204.html

Today's NYT has several op-eds claiming Spanish voters "appeased" Al-Qaida by tossing out the Popular Party, which joined Bush's distinctly unpopular war on Iraq. Voters were clearly angry that the government sought to pin the bombing on ETA, rather than admit the possibility that the war on Iraq had made Spain less safe. But pundits like David Brooks simplify this to a question of doing "what al-Qaida wants":

But I do know that reversing course in the wake of a terrorist attack is inexcusable. I don't care what the policy is. You do not give terrorists the chance to think that their methods work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/16/opinion/16BROO.html

In other words, voting for the Socialists is "letting the terrorists win" (get ready for this argument ad infinitum in the Bush-Kerry contest). But does this really make sense?

There's a conundrum here that becomes clearer if we parse Brooks in symbols. Let TA = terrorist attack and P = a "tough" status quo policy, which is either maintained or rejected. Brooks advocates democratic publics always follow a simple rule:

Necessarily, If TA then keep P

And he characterizes the only other option as

Necessarily, If TA then reject P

which is what he claims Spanish voters did, and he calls that giving control to the terrorists. On the other hand, I see both as equally giving up to the terrorists---either way, there is one option a terrorist can ensure happens.* In that sense neither course is democratic (whatever their reputational virtues may be).

Of course, another alternative is for voters to take into account the rest of their preferences (e.g., keep P after TA if they like P anyway, dump P after TA if they didn't like it anyway, or if P was only intended to stop TA, and obviously failed). Those rules don't give the terrorists any control at all, are actually democratic, and moreover are what the Spanish actually *did*.

They also avoid a trap set by Brooks and others who rail against "appeasement". The status quo policy they insist on keeping is always a "get tough" policy involving military force. If P were instead a diplomatic strategy, you can be sure they would insist on switching to force after an attack. So the only policy they want to lock in---regardless of whether it has worked or is democratically accepted---happens to be the one they personally advocate to begin with. Convenient.

* Terorists might even attack a hardened opponent not to change its policy, but to mobilize supporters for a long conflict that only later wears down the opponent. In this case, they may be even prefer an unchanged policy.

Mad social science rarely goes beyond thought experiments, and that is probably for the best. But Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, is an exception.

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/03.11/01-mockus.html

Academic turns city into a social experiment
Mayor Mockus of Bogotá and his spectacularly applied theory
By María Cristina Caballero
Special to the Harvard News Office

Antanas Mockus had just resigned from the top job of Colombian National University. A mathematician and philosopher, Mockus looked around for another big challenge and found it: to be in charge of, as he describes it, "a 6.5 million person classroom."

Mockus, who had no political experience, ran for mayor of Bogotá; he was successful mainly because people in Colombia's capital city saw him as an honest guy. With an educator's inventiveness, Mockus turned Bogotá into a social experiment just as the city was choked with violence, lawless traffic, corruption, and gangs of street children who mugged and stole. It was a city perceived by some to be on the verge of chaos.

People were desperate for a change, for a moral leader of some sort. The eccentric Mockus, who communicates through symbols, humor, and metaphors, filled the role. When many hated the disordered and disorderly city of Bogotá, he wore a Superman costume and acted as a superhero called "Supercitizen." People laughed at Mockus' antics, but the laughter began to break the ice of their extreme skepticism.

continues