The Libertarian Moral Structure

There is no greater joy in life than a Megan McArdle post on authoritarianism. This one is a movable type feast.


McArdle is piqued; once again, science is attacking libertarians with the weapons of facts and reality. Although McArdle usually prefers to attack strawmen, a blow to her very core cannot be ignored.

Conservatives are conservative because they’re authoritarian and resistant to new ideas. Everyone knows that, right? There’s a bunch of social-science research that even proves it. If only conservatives were more open and less dogmatically attached to their tribe and their traditions, the world would be a much better place.

That "bunch of social-science research that even proves it," if you follow the links, includes Bob Altemeyer's influential study on authoritarianism. McArdle does not address the science except to concede it exists and is not in dispute.  But avoiding reality leaves a reality-sized hole in one's personal narrative, so McArdle must fish around in the tepid, shallow pond of her mind for a fantasy scenario in which she stills wins by failing.

A lot of smart people endorse some version of this story. And yes, research surveys show that conservatives do express a much stronger affinity for obedience, authority and in-group loyalty than do liberals. But there’s a question those surveys can’t answer: How does what people say translate into what people actually do? Jonathan Haidt, one of my favorite social scientists, studies morality by presenting people with scenarios and asking whether what happened was wrong. Conservatives and liberals give strikingly different answers, with extreme liberals claiming to place virtually no value at all on things like group loyalty or sexual purity.

McArdle does not address the science of her own argument either, which was unwise. Dr. Haidt cowrote a paper called Understanding Libertarian Morality, a fascinating study that demonstrates the strongest component of libertarianism is a low level of empathy. The paper states "our results suggests that libertarians are particularly unemotional in their moral deliberations." Instead, libertarians say they care about liberty. What do they mean by that word?

Libertarians are not unconcerned about all aspects of morality, as suggested by their scores on the MFQ and several other widely used morality scales. Rather, consistent with their self-descriptions, they care about liberty. Like conservatives, they endorse a world in which people are left alone to enjoy the fruits of their own labor, free from government interference. They also exceed both liberals and conservatives (but are closer to liberals) in endorsing personal or lifestyle liberty.

The problem with this assessment is that the paper takes libertarians at their word. For example, the paper states:

Libertarians appear to have a coherent moral philosophy, which includes a general opposition to forcing any particular moral code upon others. Note that Paul is not saying that gambling is morally acceptable. Rather, he is saying that (negative) liberty has a moral value that supersedes other moral considerations. Libertarians seem willing to reject both liberal concerns for social justice [21] and conservative concerns for respecting existing social structure [22] when those concerns conflict with their superordinate interest in maintaining individual liberty.

Our libertarian leaders quite plainly do not have a coherent moral philosophy; they don't have a problem with restricting the poor's access to abortion or trying to cut aid to others while keeping aid for themselves. "Liberty" means personal liberty to libertarians; the right to do what they want, when they want and how they want without thought of the consequence to others. Due to that whole lack of empathy thing.

We introduced Study 3 with Rand's condemnation of love that is not based on a strong sense of self. We found that libertarians do indeed have a strong sense of self and the self's prerogatives, and a correspondingly lower sense of attachment to others. They exhibit a high degree individualism, a low degree collectivism, and generally report feeling less bonding with others, less loving for others, and less feelings of a sense of common identity with others. Libertarians have a lower degree of the broad social connection that typifies liberals as well as a lower degree of the tight social connections that typify conservatives. These social preferences were related to their moral attitudes suggesting that libertarians have less functional use for moral concerns.

In other words, they are selfish. It's not entirely their fault. They're wired that way, raised that way, paid to stay that way. And selfish they are, even if they try to hide it and their attachment to their proudly selfish philosophy.

While not all libertarians endorse the views of Ayn Rand, our findings can be summarized by the three quotations we have presented from her work. We began Study 1 with Rand's exhortation to reject “the morality of altruism,” and we showed that libertarians do indeed reject this morality, as well as all other moralities based on ideas of obligation to other people, groups, traditions, and authorities. Libertarians scored relatively high on just one moral concern: liberty. The libertarian pattern of response was found to be empirically distinct from the responses of liberals and conservatives, both in our cluster analysis of participants and in our principal components analysis of measures. We found strong support for our first prediction: Libertarians will value liberty more strongly and consistently than liberals or conservatives, at the expense of other moral concerns. [sic]

Their dominant emotional reaction in the study is hatred of being told what to do.

We introduced Study 2 with Rand's claim that Western culture can only be reborn when it can be founded on “a rational ethics.” Consistent with Rand's writing and psychological research concerning the intuitive origins of moral reasoning [8], we found that libertarians were indeed less emotional (less disgust sensitivity, empathic concern, and neuroticism) than liberals and conservatives. This lack of emotional reactivity may underlie an indifference towards common moral norms, and an attraction to an ideology where these moral codes are absent, libertarianism. The only emotional reaction on which libertarians were not lowest was reactance – the angry reaction to infringements upon one's autonomy – for which libertarians scored higher than both liberals and conservatives. This disposition toward reactance may lead to the moralization of liberty and an attraction to an ideology that exalts liberty above other moral principles – namely, libertarianism.

Which means that libertarians do not feel connected to their fellow man. They are largely male and tend towards solitude (which makes them natural gamers). Since they do not identify with their fellow man they feel no sense of kinship, responsibility, or communality.

We introduced Study 3 with Rand's condemnation of love that is not based on a strong sense of self. We found that libertarians do indeed have a strong sense of self and the self's prerogatives, and a correspondingly lower sense of attachment to others. They exhibit a high degree individualism, a low degree collectivism, and generally report feeling less bonding with others, less loving for others, and less feelings of a sense of common identity with others. Libertarians have a lower degree of the broad social connection that typifies liberals as well as a lower degree of the tight social connections that typify conservatives. These social preferences were related to their moral attitudes suggesting that libertarians have less functional use for moral concerns.

Since Haidt is one of McArdle's favorite social scientists and he discusses libertarianism, it's very odd that McArdle has no desire to discuss his work. One wonders if she even read it, for she is quick to jump on imagined slights to her image of herself and who among us is pleased to hear that her primary characteristic is a bone-deep selfishness based on lack of empathy?

Once again, we see that libertarians look somewhat like liberals, but assign lower importance to values related to the welfare or suffering of others–the benevolence value (which Schwartz defines as: “Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact”) and universalism (defined as “Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature”). It is also noteworthy that the highest mean for any Schwartz Value dimension was libertarians' endorsement of self-direction (defined as “Independent thought and action – choosing, creating, exploring”). Self-Direction was the most strongly endorsed value for all three groups, but for libertarians the difference was quite large compared to the next most endorsed value, achievement (d = 1.04). If libertarians have indeed elevated self-direction as their foremost guiding principle, then they may see the needs and claims of others, whether based on liberal or conservative principles, as a threat to their primary value.

There is a treasure trove of information available to our intrepid journalist, the better to ply her craft and increase her personal knowledge. Evidently McArdle has decided that there's nothing in it for her to do a good job, especially as she is being paid very well to do a bad one. According to Dr. Haidt, libertarians substitute cognitive analysis for emotional analysis.

Table 3 shows that libertarians were moderately more utilitarian than conservatives, and slightly more utilitarian than liberals (also see Figure 4). Their judgments were more utilitarian in both the more aversive and less aversive scenarios.

Interpretation.

The results from these moral dilemmas, which are devoid of political content, indicate that libertarians are indeed more capable of “rational ethics” where costs and benefits are weighed according to utilitarian principles. Given the body of evidence suggesting that utilitarian judgments in these dilemmas are more likely to be reached via “cold” calculation, and that deontological (rights-based) judgments are more likely to be reached via “hot” affective processes (e.g., [24], [65]), our results suggests that libertarians are particularly unemotional in their moral deliberations.

However we have seen countless times that McArdle makes emotional arguments in defense of her self-image and that she cannot follow or make a logical argument. She just thinks she is making a logical argument. The brain trust at Reason are not reasoning. The Objectivist are not objective. They just think they are. They create elaborate mental structures that they think will support their arguments but when they are examined, the arguments fall apart. Social Security is not bankrupt. Seniors don't hate having Medicare. America really does have poor people. Regulations are necessary.


As we have seen with this paper's touchstone, Ayn Rand, just because people don't understand emotions doesn't mean they don't have them, or make emotional arguments. Their arguments are based on their emotions, just like everyone else's. But those emotions run the gamut from A to A. Love is love of self. Concern is concern for one's self. Fear is fear for one's self.

The results suggest that libertarians are less likely to see moral traits as important to their core self, compared to liberals and conservatives. At the same time they are just as likely as these two groups to base their self-concept around positive non-moral characteristics, such as being funny or outgoing. Notably, libertarians were the only group to report valuing pragmatic, non-moral traits more than moral traits. Libertarians may hesitate to view traits that engender obligations to others (e.g. loyal, generous, sympathetic) as important parts of who they are because such traits imply being altruistic [48].

When you cannot feel good about yourself through contact with mankind, you must find other ways of feeling good about yourself. Libertarians feel good by getting what they want. They find proof of self-worth through "winning the (fill-in-the-blank)." What they want can vary. McArdle wants to fit in with the financial elite. Rand wanted to fit in with the intellectual-cultural elite, the same people her mother sought to conquer. The boys at Reason seem to want everyone to think they are cool. We all evaluate ourselves. If you cannot evaluate yourself by moral standards you will find others. Libertarians judge themselves by cognitive standards. They create a mental image of themselves and judge the world by how much it lives up to the imaginary world in their heads. McArdle explicitly does this when she stated that financial success is proof of morality. She knows everyone is supposed to have a moral system so she substitutes the "moral" system in her mind for the human one that almost everyone else has. Every time McArdle said that her heart broke at a child's shooting, she lied. Not because she is a liar, although she is, but because she thought it should be breaking because everyone else said that their hearts were breaking. All of these issues, questions and theories are fascinating; read the whole thing, as the kids say. And Megan McArdle ignores them. She is not interested in libertarian theory, she wants to win the dinner party/political tussle. So she picks an issue that she thinks is a winner, god help us.

One of Haidt's most memorable questions involves a man who has sex with a frozen chicken, then cooks the chicken and eats it for dinner. Is this wrong? he asks. Philosophy-class enlightenment values pretty much give one answer: No one was harmed, so it can’t be wrong. And yet: I’m willing to bet that most of the folks who say that it’s A-OK would still be weirded out if they found out this is what their spouse had prepared for a special anniversary feast. Or that this is how a co-worker spends every Monday night.

So Megan McArdle literally thinks "Philosophy-class enlightenment values" can be summed up as "keep f*cking that chicken." Once again, McArdle says something intellectually and morally brain dead because she wants to win an argument. She cannot imagine what liberals feel so she imagines what they think. Because she is petty and spiteful she imagine the worst and then she accuses liberals of these imaginary crimes.

In the ultra-liberal enclave I grew up in, the liberals were at least as fiercely tribal as any small-town Republican, though to be sure, the targets were different. Many of them knew no more about the nuts and bolts of evolution and other hot-button issues than your average creationist; they believed it on authority.

Megan McArdle doesn't know what evolution is. Really.

And when it threatened to conflict with some sacred value, such as their beliefs about gender differences, many found evolutionary principles as easy to ignore as those creationists did.

Boys have a penis and girls have a vagina. That is why equal pay will never work.

It is clearly true that liberals profess a moral code that excludes concerns about loyalty, honor, purity and obedience -- but over the millennia, man has professed many ideals that are mostly honored in the breach.

We are supposing that McArdle did not mean to say "excludes" although with her word salad it is hard to tell. McArdle believes that liberals lie when they say they care about moral values because she cannot imagine anyone truly caring about moral values unless they are trading them for an E-ticket for Pearly Gates admission. Therefore liberals are not better than libertarians and Megan McArdle and libertarians everywhere win the blogwar.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who had questions about the prevalence of conformity on both sides of the political spectrum:

The way I saw it, this slavish obedience to authority and tradition on the part of conservatives was the true source of the culture war between liberals and conservatives over foreign war, abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and racial inequality. They way I saw it, conservatives clung to old, near-sighted ways of thinking and fell in line with the dictates of the "man in charge." If only conservatives would think for themselves -- like liberals do -- the war would be over and we could get on with life, governance, and progress. Or so I thought. Then, in 2012, I went on a cycling trip around Cuba.

Jeremy Frimer, the author of the piece, noticed that socialists seemed unable to tolerate even mild questioning of Che Guevara’s eminently questionable legacy. Frimer is a researcher at the University of Winnipeg, and he decided to investigate. What he found is that liberals are actually very comfortable with authority and obedience -- as long as the authorities are liberals (“should you obey an environmentalist?”). And that conservatives then became much less willing to go along with “the man in charge.”

And since Cubans are exactly like American liberals, liberals are authoritarians too. Suck it, libs! Sadly, this is a prime example of the libertarian cognitive process. Corrupt, mean-spirited and dumb.

Frimer argues that conservatives tend to support authority because they think authority is conservative; liberals tend to oppose it for the same reason.

And liberals were against invading Iraq because liberals think they should be anti-war, not because of all the death, destruction and lingering hatred. Libertarians do not feel for others. They cannot imagine anyone else is different.

Liberal or conservative, it seems, we’re all still human under the skin.

Some of us are.

Pre-Party Activities!

Look what I got for my birthday!*

Are Liberals The Real Libertarians? by Megan McArdle, Princess of Academia

Awesome! McArdle finds out that if she squints her eyes, ignores silly liberal things like facts and reality, and slips into a lovely libertarian fantasyland, she might be able to convince you that black is white, up is down, and she is not an authoritarian because rubber-and-glue, so there!


More later!


*(this weekend)

The House Of The Rising Libertarian

It's not a good time to be a libertarian. Sure, it seems like there's a bright golden haze in the meadow and everything's goin' your way but reality begs to differ, the ungrateful brat.


First and worst, Megan McArdle is your Queen. McArdle recently said that the government--meaning us--should subsidize Solvadi's profits when the free market freely balked at paying its price for a hepatitis C treatment. Why would a libertarian make such a corporate-friendly and individual-unfriendly suggestion? Why would anyone who has a twitter account under the name janegalt commit the ultimate Randian sin of suggesting a company take money from the government instead of succeeding through innate superiority? Dagny Taggart would have thrown herself over a desk and writhed in agony at such a suggestion.


The obvious answer is that McArdle, like most libertarians, is a conservative who considers herself above Republicans. McArdle has thoroughly and consistently presented herself as a public servant who is employed to share her knowledge and skills with the masses in the lower levels of the upper class. She dispenses her wisdom to both Republicans and Democrats and scolds them both for their refusal to follow her libertarian path. She is not one of them. Authoritarians are very hierarchical; either you are above or below them and they usually treat you accordingly. McArdle sees those above her as more moral, intelligent and hard working that those below. And she sees herself and her friends as above everyone else, whose lack of financial success is therefore due to a lack of superior qualities.


We know what libertarians believe but what do they do?

 76% of younger libertarians, along with 82% of older libertarians, reported voting for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. In addition, young libertarians overwhelmingly identified with the Republican Party and favored Republican House and Senate candidates by wide margins. Among libertarians under the age of 30, those who identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party outnumbered those who identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party by 74% to 17%. Of these young libertarians, 75% reported voting for a Republican House candidate in 2012 and 81% reported voting for a Republican Senate candidate. 

... 

The libertarian philosophy of limited government holds very little appeal to nonwhite voters in general, and it holds even less appeal to younger nonwhite voters. Only 4% of nonwhite voters under the age of 30 were classified as libertarians compared with 23% of white voters under the age of 30. In contrast, 69% of younger nonwhite voters were classified as consistent or moderate liberals compared with 49% of younger white voters. These results suggest that the limited appeal of libertarian ideas to younger voters is likely to diminish further over time as the nonwhite share of this age group continues to grow.

 So most libertarians are people who voted for Romney (or people who actually thought it would be great idea to have Ron Paul as president). In other words, Republicans (and a few crazies).


Once again evil reality's facts and statistics have dragged down libertarians' attempts to achieve greatness by making shit up or creating "what if?" scenarios that depend on suspending the laws of physics, economics and psychology. Those imaginary libertarian scenarios can never fail them unless they are foolish enough to try to live them.

Let It Go

What on earth could have possessed Fareed Zakaria, leading to him to plagiarize? wonders Megan McArdle.

Journalism has only a few “capital crimes” -- offenses where a single instance can kill your career. In fact, plagiarizing and making up quotes or facts are the only two I can think of. They often get lumped in together, but as I’ve been reading and thinking about the accusations of plagiarism against Fareed Zakaria, the differences between them have loomed large.  

Making up facts or quotes is pretty clearly a crime against the reader, and possibly against the subject, depending on whether the quotes make them sound bad. The journalist is using the credibility of his or her position to get people to believe something that isn’t true. That untrue thing may be trivial -- what’s possibly most remarkable about Jonah Lehrer’s fabrications is how minor and unnecessary they often were -- but that doesn’t alter the fact that you have deliberately gotten someone to believe a lie.

Let's break this down.


1. Journalists' actions can kill their careers.


2. Such actions mostly include (a)plagiarism (b)making up quotes or facts


3. Such actions are journalism crimes.


4. Journalists who lie will lose their credibility.


However, we know:


1. Megan McArdle lied about health care statistics.


2. Megan McArdle admitted she made up facts.


3. Megan McArdle committed professional crimes.


4. Megan McArdle did not lose her credibility with the only people who matter, the ones with money.


Therefore, Megan McArdle is not a journalist. She is a propagandist.


Q.
E.
D.


Not that there's anything wrong with that. There is no reason to pretend otherwise. It's perfectly obvious that someone who tries to yank your health care subsidy while pressing her taxpayer-and-employer subsidy to her bosom is not a libertarian, journalist or intellectual. She's a shill and she should let her shill flag fly proud. It's made her rich and will make her much richer still.


The Citizens United decision left little room for the pretense that opinion is not bought and sold. Megan McArdle was bought and for a pretty penny too. She should be as proud of her courtier status as she is of her kitchen appliances. She hangs out with the rich, buys the same toys as the rich, is forwarded to the rich when she calls the riches' secretaries. She is the American Success Story.


Megan McArdle's little lie about the very foundation of her argument about health care reform is not the real lie. Her real lie is one that is seldom spoken of. From her comments:

Brent  

"But someone who is willing to tell little lies in his writing is demonstrating that he doesn’t care about the journalist’s fundamental duty to be as accurate as possible, which means you can’t trust them not to make up bigger lies as it suits them."  

Ah, Mcmegan, how inadvertently descriptive of your entire journalistic opus.  

Sigivald  

You are, I assume, conflating "lies" with "positions you disagree with". Or, even worse, "being wrong" with "lying". I've never even suspected our hostess of lying to me*, and I've been reading her since her original blog in 2001. (* Being wrong? Of course; it's impossible to avoid. Holding opinions I thought were foolish? Occasionally. But people can trivially do both of those in complete good faith, and I've seen no reason to doubt Mrs. McArdle's good faith, and fair reason to affirm it.)  

Brent  

This seems like a paraphrase of all the other troll attacks that basically use the subject of Megan's piece as an attack on her. The supposed cleverness of saying "you are guilty of the very thing you are decrying!" But as this is such a banal bit of rhetorical sputum it seems like it doesn't need to be sourced as it is now just boringly common. It would he like asking this troll to footnote "glibertarian" or "move to Somalia"

Her commenters won't care if she admits that she is merely pretending to be a journalist while peddling her ideology, which just happens to nearly perfectly match the desires of her billionaire employers. Let go of the shackles of journalism integrity, Megan McArdle! Let go of the pretense to care about others! Let go of the need to downplay your dependence on and affinity with the elite!


Let it go!


The blog glows bright on Bloomberg tonight,
Not a Koch post to be seen.
A kingdom of Both Sides Do It
And it looks like I'm the queen.
My sycophant views just cannot be denied,
Couldn't keep it in, heaven knows I tried.


Let it go, let it go.
Can't hold it back anymore.
Let it go, let it go,
Take the cash and slam the door.
I don't care what they're going to say,
Let the blogs mock on!
The shame never bothered me anyway.


It's funny how some money makes critics all seem small,
And the fears that once controlled me
Can't get past the paywall.


It's time to see what I can grift
To test the limits of my gift.
No right, no wrong, no rules for me---
I'm free!


Let it go, let it go.
I am one with the billionaires.
Let it go, let it go,
You'll never see me care.
Here I'm rich and here I'll stay,
Let the blogs mock on----


My praises travel through the airways to their ears.
My soul rejoices as I tell them what they want to hear.
And one thought compounds interest like a bank account,
I'm never going back,
My ethics line is passed!


Let it go, let it go,
And I'll join in the latest con.
Let it go, let it go,
That "impartial" girl is gone.
Here I stand in a spot that pays,
Let the scum mock on---
The shame never bothered me anyway.

Cooking Off Of The Fat Of The Land

Lisa Miller recent discussed food and class in Newsweek, quoting "Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington."

“In America,” Drewnowski wrote in an e-mail, “food has become the premier marker of social distinctions, that is to say—social class. It used to be clothing and fashion, but no longer, now that ‘luxury’ has become affordable and available to all.” He points to an article in The New York Times, written by Pollan, which describes a meal element by element, including “a basket of morels and porcini gathered near Mount Shasta.”  

“Pollan,” writes Drewnowski, “is drawing a picture of class privilege that is as acute as anything written by Edith Wharton or Henry James.”

For Megan McArdle food (and pretty much everything else) is all about privilege. Her taste in food is a reflection of her innate superiority and high social status. Her delicate, educated and experienced palate makes her appreciate finer foods and helps her determine the best recipes. Her elite milieu taught her the skills needed to produce exceptional dishes. Her kitchen appliances would be the envy of the ages (she assures us).  And when her commenters pipe up and request more food posts, what is an almost-but-not-quite-chef to do but obey?

22 Kitchen Staples For Busy Cooks  

There have been requests for more food posts around here. And as we head back into fall and the busy season for all of you who are raising kids (or covering midterm elections), I thought it might be nice to do a post on some basic staples that busy people who like to cook can use to produce tasty meals in a hurry.

McArdle proceeds to describe foods that many children would not eat on a bet and that would be little help to a parent. This eliminates a large part of her audience immediately. It is not a good start and things go downhill from here, partially because while many of McArdle's audience members appear to have plenty of money (and time to go on the internet), there are probably quite a few who are not as fortunate and cannot buy truffle oil or mail-order spices. They too are eliminated, having failed to achieve Galtian greatness and its culinary rewards.

This list is obviously not exhaustive. For one thing, I’m not covering anything that I assume most cooks already have, such as olive oil, soy sauce or balsamic vinegar -- or, for that matter, potatoes, carrots and onions. Nor am I covering the staples for specialty activities, such as baking or cooking a particular cuisine. If you bake, you know that you need flour, sugar, baking soda and so forth. If you regularly cook Indian food . . . well, I’m sure you know what’s involved, and I sure don’t.

McArdle then goes on to tell us how to buy stuff most cooks already have, onions and supplies for particular cuisines. She includes boxed tomatoes, boxed chicken broth, tomato paste, dried beans, herbs and spices, frozen chicken and fruit, and other common items in her list. McArdle obviously does not believe in eating fresh food, let alone fresh food simply prepared to bring out its natural flavors.

These are things that are useful to have around but a lot of people don’t know about, look down upon, or think will be more complicated or expensive than they actually are. So without further fanfare, here’s a list of things that you might want to add to your kitchen in the interests of extra tastiness and convenience.

Boxed tomatoes: For years, like the rest of you, I kept my pantry stocked with canned tomatoes. Then I discovered boxed tomatoes, which have many advantages over canned. For one thing, they are much more space-efficient than filling your cupboards with metal cylinders. And second, they don’t have that metallic taste. Pomi was the pioneering brand in this; they are the tomato arm of the giant Parmalat SpA milk operation. By now, most supermarkets carry the Pomi line, and at least one supermarket, Harris Teeter, has store-brand boxed tomatoes.

I can remember seeing Pomi tomatoes in a grocery store for the first time--over 20 years ago. I hope McArdle lets us know when she discovers sun-dried tomatoes and blackened redfish.

Aleppo pepper: If you’ve been reading my food writing over the past few years, you’ll know that I am obsessed with Aleppo pepper; I order it in one-pound bags from Penzeys, and it gets used in the majority of my meals. It’s a slightly smoky, moderately hot crushed pepper from the Middle East, and of course I use it in my Middle Eastern foods, but I also use it for Mexican, Asian and Italian. I like it way better than crushed red pepper flakes, and way, way better than having six kinds of specialty hot peppers in my pantry. (Though I do still have Szechuan peppers for stir-fries and chipotles in adobo for chili.)

A 1-pound bag of Penzey's Aleppo pepper is $24.20. If her audience can afford it they would probably like it as well, maybe even in the majority of their meals. Especially if they use it in the majority of their meals, otherwise the 1-or-2 person household, the only people paying attention at this point, will watch their bulk purchase slowly age into mediocrity.One pound is a lot of dried pepper. Costco is great but my family of 5 doesn't always get through their bulk items before they go bad. I can't imagine how long it would take one woman (and her husband if the item is tasty on chicken nuggets) to get through her bulk purchases.

Herbes de Provence: Herbes de Provence is an herb mix, and it’s nonstandard, so you have to find one you like. (I’m in love with the one from Penzeys.) But it’s extremely useful for fast weeknight cooking. Toss a tablespoon on potatoes with some olive oil before roasting them, or with sliced zucchini with olive oil and crushed garlic. Sprinkle over garlic bread or a roasting chicken. Chicken breasts with wine and lemon. Fish. I just don’t have time to name all the things you can do with this incredibly versatile mixture. And if you don’t cook that much, a jar or bag of this can also make a good substitute for those bottles of dried thyme, rosemary and tarragon that you rarely use.

Here is where we start to have a problem. The mixture may be versatile but who wants their vegetable, bread, and meat to all taste the same? People with fine palates usually prefer fresh food individually seasoned, not frozen meat and dried or cut herbs. People who are not foodies will not be ordering herbs and spices from a catalogue. McArdle's advice is mostly for an audience of one, namely Mrs. Megan McArdle. Oh, and P. Suderman, no doubt. No doubt....

Frozen lemon juice: Purists will sneer that you should always have fresh lemons on hand. And indeed, this is not as good as fresh squeezed lemon juice. On the other hand, you don’t have to squeeze, like, 80 lemons to make lemonade or despair because you realized halfway through cooking that you forgot to pick up the lemons at the store. It’s cheaper than getting the juice from fresh lemons, and it doesn’t spoil, the way my bags of lemons sometimes do if I haven’t been assiduous about incorporating them into my meals. While I do try to keep fresh lemons on hand, for the zest if nothing else, I always have several bottles in the freezer, which I use for everything from sauces to cocktails -- it makes very adequate hollandaise. You can defrost in the microwave in a pinch or stick the bottle in a glass and run hot water into it for five to 10 minutes.

Doesn't McArdle have an electric juicer? She has every other kitchen device known to God. So what if a few lemons go bad? Bottled lemon juice cannot compare to real; it's not even close. McArdle worries about dimes while spending a small fortune on spices and oils.

[...I]t makes very adequate hollandaise."

::shudder::

Tube spices: As with the frozen lemon juice, the spices you buy in tubes in the refrigerated area of the produce section are not as good as mincing your own fresh lemongrass, crushing garlic cloves, grating ginger and so forth. On the other hand, they are vastly more convenient, and they keep longer than many fresh herbs would. You should never make the perfect the enemy of the quite good in the kitchen. If you’re actually going to peel and grate fresh ginger any time it would make your meal better, then by all means, go ahead and do so. But if, like many of us, you will give up and decide to cook something else, then for heaven’s sake, buy some tube spices. I use ginger frequently, garlic occasionally, lemongrass and cilantro; on the other hand, I think there are better ways to get basil and parsley.

McArdle sees cooking as a dreadful chore. Peeling ginger entails scraping a paring knife down the sides of the tiny root and takes about 15 seconds. Grating with her beloved Microplane is very quick as well. Crushing garlic takes a second, mincing it less than a minute. Fresh ginger and garlic are as important as fresh basil, parsley and cilantro, and less expensive. What's more, foodies don't want an antiseptic cooking experience. They want to smell the garlic and ginger on their hands.

Dried mint: This is not a very common spice, but it should be if you make Middle Eastern or Greek food. Dried mint is especially excellent on lamb, but it’s also surprisingly good on chicken and fish. And in my humble opinion, it’s a must-have for pastitsio, one of my favorite winter casseroles. Use it instead of dried basil for a subtle and interesting difference in your meat dishes. You can order it online if you can’t find it at your local supermarket. Do not, however, attempt to use it in desserts that call for fresh mint; the results will be disgusting.

Dried spearmint is $7.29 for a 4 ounce bag at Penzey's. I would use fresh mint for the same reason I would use fresh garlic, pulled from my own plant for free because mint is nearly unkillable even by people like me who kill every other garden plant. I will have to take McArdle's word for it that mint can go with chicken and substitute for basil.

Frozen homemade pesto: In the winter months, pesto is a nice, fresh addition to salads, sandwiches and, of course, pasta dishes. But supermarket pesto isn’t very good. Luckily, pesto freezes well. In the summer, when basil is fresh and plentiful, make a double or triple batch of Marcella Hazan’s pesto recipe, which is widely recognized by all right-thinking people as the best ever. This will take you 20 minutes, including buying the ingredients. Then freeze it in a silicone ice cube tray and drop the cubes in a plastic bag. All winter, you can drop a cube or two into soup or pasta, or thaw it for sandwiches and salads. You need never fear having “no food in the house” as long as you have your pesto baggie. If you just want the fresh basil flavor without the cheesy “pesto” flavor, just chop the basil in the food processor or blender with roughly a tablespoon of olive oil per half cup of leaves; deploy wherever you would use fresh basil.

More news flashes from the 1980s. Thanks, McArdle.

Boxed chicken broth: I buy it by the case from Costco, because unless you’re a vegetarian, it’s one of the most versatile basic staples. I’m always shocked when meat eaters don’t have it in the house. Use it as a liquid for any sort of pan sauce, from stir-fries to tacos. Replace half the water in making rice for a more savory side. It’s the base for almost all my soups, even beef ones (add 1/3 cup of soy sauce to punch up that “meaty flavor”). A must for anyone with a slow cooker.

Why not use beef broth in beef dishes? Then you won't need to add way too much soy sauce to give it a meaty flavor. You add a bit of soy sauce to vegetarian dishes for meaty flavoring.

Dried beans: Let me say what so many of you have been thinking: Canned beans are gross. They sure are convenient, but they’re also slimy. And they take up a lot of room in the cupboard. Dried beans are cheaper, tastier and, I promise, they’re easy to cook. Soak them in salted water overnight (2 tablespoons salt to every 4 quarts water). In a pinch, you can also quick-soak. Drain off the water, which removes many of the indigestible sugars that can cause . . . er, well, you know all the jokes. Then, if you have a pressure cooker, just cook them at pressure for five to 10 minutes with 4 quarts water, 1 teaspoon salt and 1 tablespoon vegetable or olive oil. (You can find the exact time for your type of beans online.) If you don’t have a pressure cooker, cover with two inches of water, add oil and salt, and simmer on the stovetop for one to two hours until they’re tender. Does all this sound like a lot of work? Active time is approximately five minutes; most of the time is spent reading a magazine in a comfy chair until they’re done. And you will be rewarded with deliciously cheap, nonslimy beans.

Again, here is a weird distaste for actually touching food. You need to rinse canned beans. Then they won't be slimy. McArdle knows that most people say you can use salt when cooking beans but she doesn't know that soaking beans is not absolutely necessary, or that busy people who need to be told to buy chicken broth and think peeling ginger is too much work will not want to soak beans the night before.

Tomato paste: A surprising number of people are weirdly afraid of tomato paste, and to be fair, it does look kind of gross. Yet a tablespoon of the stuff has so many uses. I like to use it for a pan sauce with sauteed chicken or shrimp: tomato paste, white wine, lemon juice, garlic, Aleppo pepper, and a tablespoon or two of cream. (You will cleverly note that most of these ingredients are featured on this list.) A little tomato paste also punches up the flavor of your beef and lamb braises without making them taste like pasta sauce. It is also, obviously, very useful for pasta sauce. And because a little goes a long way, it doesn’t take up much space in the cupboard.

By "a surprising number of people" we assume McArdle means herself. She does seem to be grossed out by food. She and Ross Douthat should have dinner together. They could compete to see who is the most fastidious.

Frozen artichoke hearts: These are now ubiquitous, and thank heaven. A lot of people seem to associate them with oily, soggy marinated artichoke hearts, but these are nothing like that; they’re just artichoke hearts, without the work. Roast them crispy at 400 degrees with a little rosemary, olive oil and lemon zest. Saute them with chicken. Put them in the bottom of your pan when you roast a leg of lamb. Deep-fry them for crispy, melting bites of heaven. Add them to dips. Cover them with hollandaise sauce for a decadent dinner party side. I’m sure you can think of other uses.

How many times are you going to want to eat tasteless processed artichoke hearts? Especially if the hollandaise sauce has bottled lemons, the leg of lamb tastes of powered mint, and the chicken is drowning in mixed herbs?

Good truffle oil: If you don’t like truffles, don’t bother. As it happens, my husband loves truffles. Because, sadly, neither of us has inherited either a vast fortune or a truffle farm, we use truffle oil instead. The price of good truffle oil can be high, but cheap truffle oil is sometimes disgusting. And the stuff I’ve linked to goes a long, long way; 1/4 teaspoon or less suffices for most uses. It’s a fantastic addition to salad dressing (do not use it as the primary oil, obviously, just for a little extra flavor). It’s lovely drizzled on chicken, especially in a cream sauce, or tossed with white beans and Herbes de Provence. I really like it for rescuing elderly ears of corn: Just cut the corn off the cob, boil in salted water for a minute, saute in a bit of brown butter and toss with truffle oil. It’s like a cross between fresh corn and the truffle popcorn they serve in fancy bars. And did I mention truffle popcorn? Drizzle on fresh popcorn for an amazing treat, without having to buy a $15 cocktail.

McArdle's truffle oil is $10 an ounce; a bottle is $35. And they pour it over popcorn. Must be nice. Let them eat truffle oil! Can they even taste the oil amid the herbs and cream and garlic and Aleppo chili?

Tahini: Lots of cultures have sesame pastes, but rather than accumulate nine different kinds, I just use tahini for everything from hummus to sesame noodles. But it’s not just for hummus anymore. With a bit of chicken broth/wine/cream, it makes a nice pan sauce for chicken, and added to mayonnaise and Aleppo pepper, it makes a delicious potato salad. Toss it with green beans, along with soy sauce and sesame seeds, or with chickpeas or white beans along with lemon juice and a healthy spoonful of cumin. Once you have it, you’ll find all sorts of great uses for it.

You will be relieved to know that you don't need to buy nine different kinds of sesame paste to fulfill all your sesame paste needs. I think I needed it once last year. McArdle does not believe in light foods. Why use one fat when you can use two or three? Or four!

Heavy cream: It’s time for American cooks to stop being afraid of heavy cream. Anti-cream paranoia belongs on the trash heap with huge shoulder pads, stirrup pants, kinky perms and all the other wretched excesses of the 1980s. A tablespoon of cream has fewer calories than a tablespoon of olive oil; using a little bit will not make you fat. It makes a great salad dressing, and just a tablespoon or two will add richness and smoothness to pan sauces without causing you to blow up like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And it keeps longer than milk, so there’s no reason not to have a little container of it in the fridge at all times.

Maybe not, but when you add it to the truffle oil, pesto, sesame paste, olive oil, bacon fat and mayonnaise, it starts to add up.

Passion fruit nectar: Too few people in this country use passion fruit in their cooking. This represents a huge drag on Gross Domestic Deliciousness. You can make passion fruit curd with the same basic recipe you use for lemon curd, except that it’s passion fruit! Mix it with champagne for brunch cocktails instead of orange juice, or use rum and club soda for summer evenings. Make passion fruit cake. Basically, use the stuff anywhere you’d use fruit juice. If you can’t get through a whole bottle, pour it into ice cube trays and freeze.

I get it. She likes passion fruit. McArdle also seems to like drinking, yet another proof that she is not speaking to parents. Just when you need booze the most, you have to stay sober to look after the kids.

Frozen baguettes: Not as good as fresh bread. However, they don’t require a trip to the grocery store. Easy-as-heck garlic bread can be made by brushing with olive oil and crushed or tube garlic before baking. But I’m not going to elaborate; y’all know what bread is for.

They also know how to make garlic bread.

Frozen boneless, skinless chicken thighs: The American obsession with boneless, skinless chicken breasts is another risible relic from the '80s. Yes, breasts are lower in fat, but the overall caloric difference is trivial: 119 calories per 100 grams of boneless, skinless chicken thigh versus 110 for breast meat. And, unlike breast meat, it’s easy to cook chicken thighs without turning them disgustingly dry and tasteless. So buy some boneless skinless chicken thighs when they’re on special, pop them in the freezer and use them wherever you’d deploy a similarly denuded chicken breast.

Busy cooks must love the taste of sesame paste, passion fruit and dark chicken meat. Some dishes need mild white meat instead of the stronger-tasting thighs. Since I prefer chicken breast I learned how to cook it. McArdle doesn't even need to do that since she has a thermometer, which truly is an essential kitchen gadget. Here we see McArdle's basic lack of practical knowledge in the kitchen peeping out shyly from under her skirt. What busy cooks really need is advice on how to buy and prep food for quick, reliably successful cooking. Planning and organization are the key to quick cooking, even when money is evidently no object. The most time consuming part of cooking is deciding what to make and looking for the ingredients. Her advice is mostly a matter of personal taste.


She can't cook chicken breast, steak is too expensive for her, she has said, fish must be fresh and busy cooks like McArdle have a hard time getting to the grocery store. Evidently she spends a lot of time standing around in her kitchen deciding that peeling ginger, chopping onions and squeezing garlic is too much work or finding that she is missing an ingredient she needs to make what she wants. So McArdle McArdle  keeps a few favorite bottled and dried or packaged flavorings on hand to pour over her frozen chicken legs. Yum.

Bacon fat: “Dripping,” as my grandmother used to call it, is cheaper than butter, and for many applications, it’s better, because it adds flavor and has a slightly higher smoke point. If you’re having trouble getting a picky eater to eat green vegetables, see if you can’t make some headway by starting them in bacon fat rather than butter or olive oil. Eggs, obviously, are ridiculously delicious when fried in bacon fat. I like to start my mirepoix in bacon fat for hearty winter stews, and I’m not above using a bit in stir-fries, no matter how hard that makes purists shudder. Just buy a mason jar and pour off the pan into it every time you cook bacon. Pop in the fridge and scoop out a bit every time you want a little bacon flavor in your dish.

Eggs fried in bacon grease are far too greasy for some people. Obviously McArdle has a higher tolerance level for fat than most people. Bacon fat adds a lot of (strong) flavor to foods but McArdle has too many fats as staples in her cooking.

A block of Parmesan (and Parmesan rinds!): Kraft Parmesan is to freshly grated Parmesan as Bubble Yum is to a fresh strawberry. The pre-grated stuff in the supermarket is better, but not that much better. Yet many people shy away from Parmesan for a simple reason: Grating Parmesan is a pain in the butt. Yet it doesn’t have to be. You can chop it just fine in a food processor or a good blender (think Ninja grade or above) -- just cut off a piece about the size you want to grate, then pulverize. Want grated Parmesan for the table and don’t have a fancy blender? Buy a couple of Microplane graters and hand them around along with the Parmesan; everyone can grate their own. Microplane graters also make a beautiful, fast cloud of Parmesan to top salads or vegetables. And the best part is Parmesan rinds, which are amazing for soups: Cut into one-inch pieces and freeze, then toss an inch or two in your minestrone or other bean soup for absolutely amazing flavor for virtually zero work.

Cheaper Parmesean is about $10-15/lb and the good stuff is much more. It also goes bad in time, just like the lemons. It is delicious but expensive for a staple. And fatty.

Puff pastry dough: Puff pastry is one of the things where I draw the line at making homemade.

Along with almost everything else, it seems. I feel like I'm in a 1930s advertisement extolling the virtues of processed food.

Even my mother, who used to make her own croissants, has stopped making it, because there are very good commercial versions at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. For that matter, Pepperidge Farm puff pastry sheets are very serviceable. These are instant dinner party salvation: Make a quick appetizer by wrapping a wheel of brie with almonds, honey, dried cranberries and pumpkin pie spice and bake until the pastry is brown. Or make a quick dessert with frozen fruit, spices and a puff pastry shell. Brush with melted butter and sprinkle with grated cheese, then cut into squares or slices -- hello, cheese straws. Fold around seasoned meat for an easy meat pie. Fill a ramekin with creamed chicken and vegetables, and top with puff pastry: chicken pot pie! Bake, then layer with whipped cream and sweetened fruit: instant napoleon. But you get the idea. It’s an endlessly versatile way to produce something dinner-party-ready at short notice.

Now our busy cook is throwing an impromptu dinner party with puff pastry despite the fact it takes two hours to defrost in the refrigerator. I'm getting mixed messages here.

Frozen fruit: If you’re trekking to the grocery store in March and carefully selecting fresh peaches to peel and make into a tart, I have bad news for you: You’re wasting your time. I’m not saying that frozen fruit is as good as fresh for baking: I’m saying it’s much better. Unless the fruit you’re using is local and in season, you’re carefully preparing something that has been picked green so that it can survive the journey to your refrigerator.

Herein we see another peek at the inner working of McArdle's mind. A foodie will look for fresh foods in season and design their dish around it. The taste and texture of fresh fruit is totally different from that of frozen fruit.

Frozen fruit, on the other hand, was picked ripe, made a short trip to a nearby food processing plant, and then peeled for you and flash-frozen at the peak of its flavor. On top of its flavor virtues, frozen fruit is more convenient, keeps for a year and it’s cheaper.

Penny wise and pound foolish.

You should always use it in cooking unless you’re getting something absolutely fresh from a nearby field. Don’t just use it for smoothies or frozen cocktails; think of it as your Emergency Dessert Reserve. It takes about 10 minutes of cooking with a little sugar, water and lemon juice to make to-die-for raspberry puree, or you can thaw berries with 1/4 cup of sugar for a very tasty shortcake topping. Bake it in pies and tarts and cobblers, simmer and strain for custards. Anyway, you get the idea: Unless it’s absolutely fresh, an apple or you’re planning to eat it straight, buy frozen whenever you can.

Unless you buy fresh, buy frozen. How much did she get paid for giving that advice?


We're almost done, thank God.

Frozen onions: If you cook intermittently, frozen chopped onions are a great shortcut; they’re always there when you need them. And if we’re talking pearl onions, then I have to admit I prefer them. Yes, yes, I’ve stood there peeling my little onions, cutting the tiny X's in the bottoms and gently poaching them . . . and the result, in a braise or a cream sauce, is maybe 5 to 10 percent better than buying them frozen in the bag. The problem is that when I consider the effort required to get that 5 to 10 percent, I’m tempted to just not make them at all, especially if it’s a weeknight. So go ahead -- buy frozen onions that you’ll actually use, rather than fresh onions that you’ll let rot before you start fiddling with the paring knife. They’re a handy, delicious addition to almost anything you might want to roast, and delicious in their own right roasted with herbs or slathered with bechamel.

Also known as creamed onions, a classic dish from an era of slathering everything in béchamel. It's heavy and fatty but McArdle likes it that way. Let's take a look at the Onion Problem. Onions are staples and will easily last a week in the refrigerator. Like McArdle I live in a hot, humid climate and can't store vegetables in the open. So onions are easily available fresh. They take very little time to peel and chop, especially if you put a $200 ceramic knife on your wedding gift register and it now resides with its many bretheren in a big knife block. But then you have to touch food and McArdle has a little problem with that so she tells her audience to just go ahead and use frozen chopped onions instead. But having said that "frozen chopped onions are a great shortcut" and that "they’re always there when you need them," McArdle also says that they aren't good enough for her own cooking.

Downpuppy ‏@Downpuppy · 21h @asymmetricinfo  

Frozen chopped onions? I could have searched a dozen stores and not found something so silly!  

Megan McArdle ‏@asymmetricinfo · 21h @Downpuppy  

I've never used them, but I know people who swear by them in a pinch. And fresh pearl onions just aren't worth the hassle.  

Downpuppy ‏@Downpuppy · 21h @asymmetricinfo Pearl onions are hideous at best, and frozen is far from best.

How does McArdle know that frozen onions are great if she's never used them? If she is just passing along second-hand knowledge she should say so in the post. I call shenanigans.

Of course, I haven’t exhausted the list of handy shortcuts, flavorings and bases; I’ve just named a few of my favorites. Readers are invited -- indeed, requested -- to add their own in the comments.

I feel fatter just reading about her food choices. But here we have ironclad proof of McArdle's superior palate and there is no doubt that she would be an even better cook if she cold find time to go to the grocery store or bring herself to touch raw food. But how do we reconcile her advice for busy cooks with her other advice for buying a sous vide and thermomix? The latter takes care of all that pesky chopping and the former, although it requires advance preparation, means McArdle just needs to sear tasty little packets of  perfectly cooked meat and poultry.  Spend about $3,500.00, pour a couple pounds of fat over your prepared food, and voila, instant foodie perfection the McArdle way!

Parks and Recreation

We do not say it often enough: Megan McArdle is one of the laziest, most incurious "journalists" in existence.

Not far from my house, there is a reservoir and an elderly sand-filtration water-treatment plant that is no longer in service. As with so many things in the District of Columbia, its future use is the subject of heated debate. As I understand the history of the place, the city could have gotten the site for free from the federal government to use as a park, but instead bought it so that it could be developed for residential housing. As that development moves forward, a bitter dispute has grown between the Friends of McMillan Park, who would like to make it a park, and the locals who want more housing there.

"As I understand" means "I could not be bothered to even read the Wikipedia article on the park I am discussing." As always, McArdle misses out on the interesting part of her job--learning new information--so she can quickly skip on over to her favorite part, talking about herself and her desires. McArdle is referring to the McMillan Sand Filtration Site and park, built on federally owned land in 1905 to treat water from the Potomac. It was replaced with a new treatment plant in 1985.

The site's future became uncertain, though, in 1986 when the Corps of Engineers declared the property surplus and asked the General Services Administration to dispose of it. GSA iterated its position that open space was not the highest and best use of the property, and insisted on selling the property for mixed commercial development over the objections of the McMillan Park Committee.[8] The District of Columbia government purchased the site from the federal government in 1987 for $9.3M, in order to facilitate development. Since the time of purchase, the property has remained unused and closed to the public.  

Recent developments[edit]  

The D.C. government is again considering the McMillan Sand Filtration Site for commercial and residential development. The National Capital Revitalization Corporation (NCRC), a development agency created by the city, selected the site as part of a land swap deal involving Anacostia riverfront property and the construction of the Nationals Park baseball stadium. (The government dissolved the NCRC in 2007 and merged its functions into the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development.[9]) The government selected a development team, Vision McMillan Partners, in 2007.[10] Their proposal includes a mix of uses, including housing, shopping and office space. The site would also include a network of accessible park space, including 6.25 acres on the southern end of the site, a 1 acre healing garden on the north end, and an acre of green space over a preserved cell at the north end.

So what's the problem? DC bought the property to develop it, and now it will finally be developed. Soon, corporations will make a lot of money building the new development, small business will open, and, best of all, shopping!!! Why isn't McArdle happy?

Well, I think I understand the economics of housing prices pretty well. Nonetheless, I’m with the Friends of McMillan: The site should be turned into a park and the housing pressure relieved by upzoning nearby areas. It’s not an opinion I’m too vocal about, because the arguments tend to be tedious and repetitive. But now that I’ve gone ahead and stated an opinion, let me explain. It’s pretty simple, really: Dense cities need big parks to thrive. I grew up in Manhattan, and I’m quite fond of dense living. I like having neighbors on either side of me, a few inches away. It doesn’t feel oppressive or crowded; it feels cozy.  

But if you want people to commit to lifelong density, they need some open space to escape to -- somewhere they can walk to. It’s no accident that New York has an extensive park within walking distance of so many of its dense neighborhoods; it’s the safety valve that allows people to live in such close quarters without killing each other. Very dense cities such as New York are exciting places to live, but they also produce high levels of psychological stress in the people who live there. Parks can help soothe some of that distress, making it easy to spend the rest of the day surrounded by strangers.  

Unfortunately, the area of D.C. in question doesn’t have much in the way of open space other than cemeteries and McMillan. If we build there, we’re pretty much giving up on the idea of having a big park within walking distance. (There will be a park included as part of the new development, but it will be pretty small.)

So an 8.25 acre park isn't enough for McArdle, she wants the whole 22 acres. But the city says it's not needed and new development is. We find it utterly shocking that all that land is just sitting there and nobody is developing it for the greater glory of technology and mankind. Let's let McArdle explain:

Yesterday, I rode the bus for the first time from the stop near my house, and ended up chatting with a lifelong neighborhood resident who has just moved to Arizona, and was back visiting family. We talked about the vagaries of the city bus system, and then after a pause, he said, "You know, you may have heard us talking about you people, how we don't want you here. A lot of people are saying you all are taking the city from us. Way I feel is, you don't own a city." He paused and looked around the admittedly somewhat seedy street corner. "Besides, look what we did with it. We had it for forty years, and look what we did with it!"  

I didn't know quite what to say. It's true that for a variety of historical reasons--most prominently, the 1968 riots that devastated large swathes of historically black DC--our neighborhood has more in the way of abandoned buildings than retail. And I'm hardly going to endorse the gang violence about which he presently discoursed at length. But the reason we moved into our neighborhood is that we want to live in a place that's affordable, and economically and racially mixed. We don't want to take the city from them; we just want to live there too. Perhaps I should have said that.

The new residents don't want to take the park from them. They just want to live there too. After all, the neighborhood had the park for decades and did nothing with it.


It's only fair.

Place Holder Post

Aaargh. Once again, life keeps me too busy to post. But I will post on McArdle's extended whine about all the meanies who torment her and, especially, her Ode To Her Consumerism, kitchen edition.


Sneak Peak:

This [kitchen remodel] longing grew especially urgent when the open shelving installed by our handyman failed, destroying much of our storage space and a large collection of Fiestaware.

For some strange reason McArdle has an endless array of problems with her servants. Doing things on the cheap is often the culprit in such situations. And, more important, McArdle has a large collection of Fiestaware and we are just hearing about it now? I know a bit about vintage jewelry, glassware, china and kitchenware and would have loved to hear about what would be a very valuable collection.


Also, I might have warned her that since Fiestaware is very heavy, it's not a good idea to put a large collection of it on open shelves that might collapse. If it is 1980s Fiestaware (marked with a capital, not a small, F), then it is not terribly valuable and no great loss.

Because the truth is, my kitchen is more than adequate. It looks a bit funny, and sometimes I have to take extra steps. But it’s filled with magic stuff that would have made my great-grandmother faint from envy. And I’m not just talking about my amazing collection of kitchen gadgets. I’m talking about things like my mid-range GE oven, which has a thermostat so that I don’t have to make “try cakes,” burners that are instantly adjustable and insulation so effective that I have to be careful about the puff of very hot steam that hits my face every time I open it during cooking. ... I have everything I need in my kitchen right now: amazing tools to cook with, more fresh, delicious ingredients than any human has ever had available at any previous time in human history, and people to cook for.

Nobody has had to make "try cakes" since wood-burning stoves; gas stoves are excellent. McArdle's great modern convenience has been around for a hundred years. But we've been through this before.

Shorter Megan McArdle: Sucks To Be You

Megan McArdle has weighed in with her keen assessment on the Ferguson riots: Reverse gentrification is hell. Evidently the real problem is just that the cops are white and the community is black.

Demographic transition, combined with a long institutional lag, is a recipe for a yawning disconnect between the police and the community they serve. And occasionally, that disconnect turns violent. Young black men always have good reason to fear the police. But when so few of those police officers have ever been young black men, it’s much harder to manage those tensions.  

What is a little bit surprising is that it has gotten to this point in a majority-black community. My understanding of the literature on riots is that they are typically triggered by some sort of police violence against a minority, in situations where the population feels that it has no other means of redress. That they feel this way in a city where they are the majority of the electorate suggests just how powerful, and fraught, demographic transition can be.

Or, you know, chronic and long-standing racism.

McArdle does have one more pearl of wisdom: she doesn't see why reporters should have special rules to protect them.

Now, I’m not one of those who subscribes to the notion that reporters are some sort of a super-race who should be immune from normal rules.

It's not like she will ever need protection for her hard-hitting articles that expose official corruption, after all.



Now that we know we should sit and wait for racially balanced police forces to solve racism in America, let's look at our obscene level of inequality. We know it's not all that bad because Megan McArdle has said so frequently, and now she tells us that even the rich don't think it's good for the millennial generation to have very much money.

I think that most people need a real fear of failure to spur them to greater achievements -- but having lived through some of those failures myself, I can’t exactly recommend the stark terror that you might not be able to earn a living. It’s terrifying to send your kids out there in the world to take real risks with big potential costs. Unfortunately, it’s often even more dangerous to keep them “safe.”

So if middle class parents can no longer give their children enough advantages to keep the kids in the middle class it's not big thing. Failure leads to success and fear is good for the soul.



Speaking of failure, McArdle tells us that raising property taxes on the rich in England won't wash because the intellectuals won't support higher taxes that they might have to pay as well.

Of course, the power of the Henrys also makes it harder to displace them. If London is anything like New York, I suspect that a Labour leader who actually tries to implement a mansion tax would find that a large percentage of their supporters in the public intelligentsia are themselves sitting on real estate assets they could not possibly afford to buy today -- and that normally reliable left-wing supporters will come out against such a tax unless it contains some sort of grandfather clause to keep taxes from rising on people who have owned their houses for a long time. Perhaps the British will prove more resolute in the face of upper-middle-class self-protection than American politicians have proven to be. But I suspect they’ll need an iron will if they want to actually give the Henrys the boot.

Nobody can do anything ever!

And speaking of that, we can't help poor people being charged high interest rates because they would just be ripped off some other way.

Credit has long been thought of as a democratizing force. It enabled ordinary Americans to buy houses, cars and other amenities that had previously only been available to those with substantial capital. But over the last few decades, that process has been reversed. Financial irresponsibility is, of course, one of the things that drives a bad credit score. But so does unstable, low-skilled employment and a thin margin of financial error between you and the basics of American middle-class life. So what we’re seeing is a redistribution of benefits not just from the financially irresponsible to the financially responsible, but also from the labor market’s “have nots” to its “haves.”  

Those on the left see this problem and call for the reinstitution of usury laws to cap the amount that those with low credit scores can be asked to pay. And, of course, that would keep those 25-percent-interest auto loans from bleeding the family budget dry. But it would not put the Big Data genie back in the bottle; loan companies would still know that these people are bad risks. They would substitute even higher down-payment requirements -- or outright denial of the loans -- for the higher interest rates they’re now charging.  

Knowledge is power, as they say. But that power is not necessarily equally distributed.

So sad, but that's just the way it is.

Ooops--The Prequel

Shorter Megan McArdle: I was wrong but others have also been wrong as well so give a poor blogging gal a break.


Much more on this later, as we see McArdle attempt to gin up a controversy, look stupid in the process, and have to crawl her way backwards through the cat door of humiliation.

The Non-Explanation of the Non-Apology

James Fallows has now commented on the Frummery taking place in The Atlantic.

1. A colleague at The Atlantic made a major journalistic error this week.

He certainly did. David Frum stated that a photo of blood-covered Palestinians was a fake when it was not. He based his accusation on the musings of man with no credibility. And then he apologized by issuing a non-apology in which he lied about the number of tweets he had made.




Fallows goes on to explain why journalists need to be skeptical and then brings us home:

As he would point out quickly himself, David Frum is not of this part of the journalistic world. If he were, he would have known how grave an accusation he was making, and he would not have made it without being sure. I respect him for promptly* apologizing and saying that he had been wrong. And I have written this dispatch to express, and encourage, respect for the reporters in the Middle East and elsewhere now taking risks to tell us what they have seen.  

* Several readers have noted that the apology came six days after the original tweets, so I shouldn't have written "promptly" the first time. The rest of the sentence stands.

Not a word about bias, and heart-felt support for Frum's one-sided skepticism.

How To Become Wealthy In One Easy Lesson

Shorter Megan McArdle: The key to savings is "self-control."


Shorter McMegan's commenters: The key to savings is not having children.


Another key to acquiring wealth is to make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year working for billionaires who need someone to remove those pesky regulations that keep them from polluting or killing people. McArdle forgets that one.

The McArdle View Of Current Events

Shorter Megan McArdle: Death spiral, revisited.


She is very neutral here. Since her capacity for spite has been amply proven, she is probably about to burst with repressed emotion.

The First Step

Conservative women usually abort their Downs Syndrome babies. As do most women who are pregnant with a baby with the syndrome. For pro-lifers, this must not stand.

New Down syndrome law ensures moms-to-be greater access to available help  

By Campbell North / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  

Ever since her birth, Chloe Kondrich has taken her family on an unexpected journey. Chloe, born with Down syndrome in 2003, has now led the family up the steps of the State Capitol.  

This morning in Harrisburg, Gov. Tom Corbett is expected to sign the Down Syndrome Prenatal Education Act, otherwise known as Chloe’s Law, named after the Upper St. Clair 11-year-old and spearheaded by her father.  

The legislation, which passed with a rare bipartisan vote, 50-0 in the Senate and 196-4 in the House, requires health care providers to make a woman who receives the prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome — a common genetic disorder that comes with mild to moderate developmental delays — aware that they can receive a full range of factual and supportive information through the Pennsylvania Department of Health.  

Information includes physical, developmental, educational and psychosocial outcomes as well as contacts for relevant resource centers, clearinghouses, support services and First Call programs. One service available is the state-funded early intervention program, which provides in-home service and therapy through qualified specialists.  

Shortly after her parents discovered Chloe’s condition they devoted themselves to early intervention efforts to help her physical and mental development and became advocates for other children and families whom Down syndrome affects.  

Her father, Kurt, left a career in law enforcement to work full time on advocacy efforts and is now on the Interagency Coordinating Council for Early Intervention.  

Her mother, Margie, credits Chloe for helping her brother Nolan, 15, know unconditional love and patience at such a young age.  

“I don’t want any expectant mother to feel that pain or confusion when they get a prenatal diagnosis. I want this law to give women hope,” Mrs. Kondrich said. “Chloe was a blessing.”

Unconditional love in childhood is very important but it must come from the parents, first and foremost. A sister is not a lesson in Christian values, she is a person. If the brother is being told that he can't have negative feelings towards his sister, he is just learning to repress his own needs for his parents' needs to find God's goodness in their difficulty.

Kishore Vellody, medical director of the Down Syndrome Center at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, echoed Mrs. Kondrich’‍s sentiment, saying he sees the necessity of the new law, which will outline physicians’ responsibilities in delivering the news of a Down syndrome prenatal diagnosis.  

“Published data shows that less than half of people felt like their training was accurate in communicating prenatal diagnosis,” he said. “Even in my med school textbooks, a lot of things we learned about Down syndrome was inaccurate because it takes so long to have them updated.”  

Within the past 30 years, the increase in information and standard medical care has been dramatic and is mirrored by the increase in life expectancy for people with Down syndrome, from 25 in the 1980s to 60 and beyond now.  

“Our goal in medicine is to make sure people receive balanced and accurate information when they make decisions about health care,” Dr. Vellody said. “That’s why we support endeavors to help expectant parents.”  

Mr. Kondrich spearheaded the advocacy effort for the legislation in September after discovering that more than 90 percent of women terminate their pregnancy after receiving a prenatal diagnosis for Down syndrome.

If you tell someone that their child will almost certainly outlive them but will still be in a state of child-like innocence and trust, that is not a good thing. That is exactly what would strike terror in a parent's heart. Obviously there is nothing bad in this law but the anti-abortion aspects of it are also obvious. This is the first step. There will be others. A waiting period, required classes, pressure, guilt, a greater burden instead of a lighter one.

Down syndrome occurs when someone is born with a full or partial extra copy of chromosome 21 and results in distinct physical traits, increased risk for certain medical conditions and mild to moderate cognitive delays.  

However, “the more I interact with someone who has Down syndrome, the more I think I am the one who has one chromosome less, instead of them having one extra,” said Dr. Vellody. “They tend to be loving, caring and forgiving — features we are missing a lot in general society.”

Tell a woman she has to raise a child to pay for society's sins. That'll work.

The Kondrich family agreed. Down syndrome as a diagnosis doesn’‍t limit what Chloe can do.  

“She met Gov. Corbett and read to him. I mean she helped change a state law, helped make it a better place,” Mrs. Kondrich said.  

Chloe has also been reading since age 3 and reads at the same level of her sixth-grade peers at Boyce Middle School.

Mrs. Kondrich must find meaning where there is none, a blessing in a genetic error. It's how she survives. Come back in 30 years and see what she says then.

State Rep. Jim Marshall, R-Big Beaver, prime sponsor for the act, said, “We hope this will raise awareness to parents who may get the diagnosis and be initially afraid of what the result will be. I think it will raise awareness that their kid is going to be different, not imperfect. There really isn’t anything more perfect than a happy child.”

I find it very hard to believe that a kid is never unhappy. There's a pretty picture in pro-life peoples' minds of obedient, good-natured, sweet children with Downs Syndrome but that does not seem realistic. Kids have a full range of emotions. Youth or innocence or developmental delay does not equal sweetness and light. In fact:

Managing Behavior  

What Are Some Behavioral Challenges Typical In Persons with Down Syndrome?  

The definition of a "behavior problem" varies but certain guidelines can be helpful in determining if a behavior has become significant.  

##Does the behavior interfere with development and learning? 

##Are the behaviors disruptive to the family, school or workplace? 

##Is the behavior harmful to the child or adult with Down syndrome or to others?  

##Is the behavior different from what might be typically displayed by someone of comparable developmental age?  

The first step in evaluating a child or adult with Down syndrome who presents with a behavior concern is to determine if there are any acute or chronic medical problems related to the identified behavior. The following is a list of the more common medical problems that may be associated with behavior changes.  

##Vision or hearing deficits  

##Thyroid function ##Celiac disease  

##Sleep apnea  

##Anemia  

##Gastroesophageal reflux  

##Constipation  

##Depression  

##Anxiety  

Evaluation by the primary care physician is an important component of the initial work-up for behavior problems in children or adults with Down syndrome.  

The behavioral challenges seen in children with Down syndrome are usually not all that different from those seen in typically developing children. However, they may occur at a later age and last somewhat longer. For example, temper tantrums are typically common in 2-3 year olds, but for a child with Down syndrome, they may begin at 3-4.  

When evaluating behavior in a child or adult with Down syndrome it is important to look at the behavior in the context of the individual's developmental age, not only his or her chronological age. It is also important to know the individual's receptive and expressive language skill levels, because many behavior problems are related to frustration with communication. Many times, behavior issues can be addressed by finding ways to help the person with Down syndrome communicate more effectively.  

What Are Some of the Common Behavior Concerns?  

Wandering/running off The most important thing is the safety of the child. This would include good locks and door alarms at home and a plan written into the IEP at school regarding what each person's role would be in the event of the child leaving the classroom or playground. Visual supports such as a STOP sign on the door and/or siblings asking permission to go out the door can be a reminder to the child or adult with Down syndrome to ask permission before leaving the house.  

Stubborn/oppositional behavior A description of the child or adult's behavior during a typical day at home or school can sometimes help to identify an event that may have triggered non-compliant behavior. At times, oppositional behavior may be an individual's way of communicating frustration or a lack of understanding due to their communication/language problems. Children with Down syndrome are often very good at distracting parents or teachers when they are challenged with a difficult task.  

Attention problems  

Individuals with Down syndrome can have ADHD but they should be evaluated for attention span and impulsivity based on developmental age and not strictly chronological age. The use of parent and teacher rating scales such as the Vanderbilt and the Connors Parent and Teacher Rating Scales can be helpful in diagnosis. Anxiety disorders, language processing problems and hearing loss can also present as problems with attention.  

Obsessive/compulsive behaviors These can sometimes be very simple; for example, a child may always want the same chair. However, obessive/compulsive behavior can also be more subtly repetative, manifesting through habits like dangling beads or belts when not engaged directly in an activity. This type of behavior is seen more commonly in younger children with Down syndrome. While the number of compulsive behaviors in children with Down syndrome is no different than those in typical children at the same mental age, the frequency and intensity of the behavior is often greater. Increased levels of restlessness and worry may lead the child or adult to behave in a very rigid manner.  

Autism Spectrum Disorder Autism is seen in approximately 5-7% of individuals with Down syndrome. The diagnosis is usually made at a later age (6-8 years of age) than in the general population. Regression of language skills, if present, also occurs later (3-4 years of age). Potential intervention strategies are the same as for any child with autism. It is important for signs of autism to be identified as early as possible so the child can receive the most appropriate therapeutic and educational services.  

How Should Parents and Caregivers Approach Behavior Issues in Individuals With Down Syndrome?  

1.Rule out a medical problem that could be related to the behavior.  

2.Consider emotional stresses at home, school or work that may impact behavior.  

3.Work with a professional (psychologist, behavioral pediatrician, counselor) to develop a behavior treatment plan using the ABC's of behavior. (Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence of the behavior).  

4.Medication may be indicated in particular cases such as ADHD and autism. Intervention strategies for treatment of behavior problems are variable and dependent on the individual's age, severity of the problem and the setting in which the behavior is most commonly seen. Local parent and caregiver support programs can often help by providing suggestions, support and information about community treatment programs.  

Psychosocial services in the primary care physician's office can be used for consultative care regarding behavior issues. Chronic problems warrant referral to a behavioral specialist experienced in working with children and adults with special needs.  

What About Behavioral Changes in Adulthood?  

These can be caused by a number of factors: difficulty with transitions into adolescence or young adulthood, with the loss of social networks, departure of older siblings, death of loved ones, move out of the home or transfer from a protective school environment into a work situation; sensory deprivation, either visual (e.g. cataracts) or auditory (hearing loss); emotional trauma; hypothyroidism; obstructive sleep apnea; depression; and Alzheimer’s disease. While Alzheimer’s disease occurs earlier and more often in adults with Down syndrome than in the general population, not every behavioral or cognitive change in an adult with Down syndrome should be ascribed to this form of dementia.  

The reversible causes enumerated above should be considered, sought after and treated.  

*** NDSS thanks special guest author Bonnie Patterson, MD for preparing this piece. - See more at: http://www.ndss.org/Resources/Wellness/Managing-Behavior/#sthash.nFbppAvz.dpuf

I don't see how any right-to-lifer will be able to stop with an information packet or a few words from a nurse or doctor. They will work on outlawing these abortions and they won't stop until they get it.


The parents are the ones who must live with the decision so the parents must be the ones who make the decision, without pressure from anyone else.


When pro-lifers start voting to increase social services we can start believing that they are just trying to help.

Economic Predictions

Megan McArdle's output has been odd of late; unusually short posts, infrequent posting, and especially very rare early posting leads one to wonder what is going on in the little scamp's life. Her latest post states that we should not blame Obama for DC's gentrification, which is extremely generous of her considering that for years she has been predicting Obama will end the world as we know it.


Usually McArdle comes out with a Happy Job Announcement after such attempts to be fair-n-balanced; she markets herself as above the petty partisan fray and therefore she might be searching for a new position or other money-making opportunity. However she might just be dashing off a few posts between peddling her book in the media, so we will just have to wait and see.


Last week McArdle lovingly described the stacks and piles into which she has placed all her wonderful money while telling her envious audience that she is trying to pay down her mortgage very swiftly. Some people might think it a bit tacky to describe one's wealth in such detail right after informing us that the poor are unfortunate road-kill on her superhighway to prosperity, but McArdle is not one of those people.  One wonders what P. Suderman, boy gamer, thinks of her financial plans; is he thrilled to Silas Marner his pay like McArdle, watching the growing electronic numbers glitter like gold, or is he dreaming of community property laws?


Wait and see, my friends. Wait and see.


THRILLING UPDATE! McArdle did an "international radio interview," according to her twitter.


SECOND DAY OF THRILLING UPDATES!:


Heh!

random_eddie • a day ago


  "We figure it will take us a little less than three years to recoup our refinancing costs, which included points to buy down our rate."  

When I was shopping for a mortgage, I assumed that I'd be paying points to buy down the rates. Low rates are good, right? Especially over the long run, right? It just makes sense, right?  

Wrong. Turns out you can calculate how much of a return you're likely to get on the points you pay, based on how long you think you're going to hold your mortgage (i.e. how long until you pay it off, refinance, or sell). There are calculators on the Internet that will give you either a) the break-even period (this is NOT the same as the three years you mentioned above) or b) the effective rate of return. If the break-even period is longer than you expect to hold the loan, or conversely if the effective rate of return is lower than you expect to earn on your marginal investment, then paying points is a losing proposition.  

I shopped rates. On all quotes from all lenders, the rate of return from paying points was mediocre at best; close enough to the long-run market return that paying points wasn't an obvious slam-dunk win. So instead I kept my cash, figuring that between increased marginal savings and the opportunity cost of liquid funds (especially when buying a house - moving costs, new carpet, fixing the thousand natural shocks that houses are heir to), if the interest rates make it a toss-up situation then cash on hand comes out ahead.


   

Bullitt315   • a day ago
Congratulations on your introduction to finance 101.  

random_eddie   • 20 hours ago  

It may be simple and basic, but it seems a lot of people - including our hostess - don't know about it.

Bullitt315  • 20 hours ago
She's knows it. People aren't finance 101. The snark was uncalled for but I put more in my mortgage now because I rather not spend too much time on personal finance. Ballpark is usually 3-5 years and I know i'll be in my house for longer than that and I also know I ballpark my savings. I could divert the same extra payment to a savings or investment account but if times get lean, I might have to tap it in a down market. I know I shouldn't eat cheetos so I don't buy them. I don't put them on the counter and say "Bullitt, don't eat!"


  

random_eddie  • 19 hours ago
  This is the Internet; snark is always called for. :)


 

Megan is exactly the sort of person who can understand the math AND form a long-term plan AND have the discipline required to stick to it. She's already talked about how she and Peter have been setting aside uncommonly-large portions of their paycheck and putting it into emergency funds, long-term savings, and their mortgage principal. That kind of math+discipline is exactly what's needed to make a 30yr-plus-invest-the-extra pay off vs. a 15yr.  

If you do the math and have the discipline, it adds up to some hundreds of thousands of dollars. Megan is certainly welcome to give up that money if she wishes. But it seems like an odd thing to do, especially since (as she put it) "I don’t know about you, but I could find something to do with an extra $200,000."   

 

McMegan  • a day ago  

We expect to be in the home 15 years from now, so this is not an issue for us.
 

random_eddie   • a day ago Even at fifteen years, it may not pay off as much as you think.  

An actual example, using rate quotes I got last week from a major national retail bank:  

15yr fixed, held for 15 years
Zero points: 3.38%
0.75 points: 3.25%
33% marginal tax rate  

Rate of Return Over 15 Year Holding Period:
Pre Tax 5.41%
After Tax 4.51%  

That's a lousy return on your investment. Maybe the specific deal that you got has better numbers, but if you didn't run them through a calculator (specifically, a calculator such as you might find on the internet by searching for "mortgage points return on investment calculator") then you may be surprised at how little your investment in points is actually paying off.

Doesn't he know that her calculators never work?




ADDED: Snicker