The Quotable Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle in a FIRE speech:

Of course I get the people who write into me and say how dare you say this.  Do you understand how hurtful this was to me?  And some of them are really funny.  Do you understand how hurtful it was to me to say that the minimum wage should not be raised?  It is like well I’m sorry that I hurt your feelings, but I cannot really plan around that.  You seem to have very delicate feelings – next week why croissants are bad.

McArdle hysterically defending herself from people who pointed out her lack of intellectual or moral capacity:

 Judging from the behaviour of most of the doves in public discourse... the most important thing for them seems to be exacting revenge on the hawks and declaring that the doves are now forever their moral and intellectual superiors, even though their nasty public invective ensures that the next time around, the hawks will be exactly as unwilling to listen to them as they were last time. Julian's commenters are certainly doing their best to put me in this camp.

But since I really do believe that better future decisions are more important than my umbrage at petty interpersonal exchanges, I am fighting to supress that urge. Among other strategies for analysing my decisionmaking, I look to the ways in which the dovish decisionmaking process worked better than mine, so that I can emulate those ways. And to me, I'm sorry if this hurts your tender little feelings, but as far as I can tell, it wasn't that much better. What many, or even most, of the doves had was an instinctive antipathy to American military action that is so closely bundled with a zillion other ideological predispositions, some of which to me seem practically self-evidently wrong, that I can't find a decisionmaking process to even analyse; the grounds for opposing the war shifted even as the opposition didn't. Let me make it thoroughly clear: the same shitty decisionmaking was evident on the side of the hawks. But trading one set of questionable propositions for another is not an improvement in decisionmaking; it's playing some sort of metaphysical Monty Hall game. And playing it badly. [my bold]

 

McArdle explaining how fighting economic inequality is just envy, and raising taxes is like throwing acid on a beautiful woman's face.

While I am much more sanguine than most libertarians about redistributing material wealth from the richer to the poorer (though by the standards of the rest of America, I am still a hard-hearted materialist lout), I cannot believe in this sort of redistribution--"cutting down the tall poppies", as I believe the Australians call it. Perhaps a little thought experiment will explain why. 

Beauty, like wealth, is relative--it benefits its possessor only insofar as they are lovelier than the women, or handsomer than the men, around them. Presumably, if we disfigured all the good looking actors in Hollywood, and the models in New York, and . . . well, heck, let's slash the faces of everyone who's better looking than I am. I am younger and slimmer than the average American, and have good teeth, long thick hair, and all the other accoutrements of an upper-middle-class upbringing. So we know that this would bring happiness to far more Americans than it would distress. We dont have to turn them into quasimodo--just make them no more good looking than I am. Just think how happy America could be made if Cindy Crawford had saddlebags and a squint.

But wait! Americans could be made even happier if Cindy Crawford and her ilk had acid poured on their faces to turn them into a twisted mass of scars, and were inflated a hundred pounds or so apiece through gavage. Physical pain could be alleviated by judicious application of modern painkilling technology, providing a huge psychic boost to everyone else at only a mild psychic cost (at least according to Daniel Gilbert) to the pulchritudinous elites.

Of course, to judge from our mass-market journalism, Americans actively enjoy watching young, pretty people suffer. Why else to we spend so much time talking about celebrity divorces, Kirstie Alley's weight gain, and grisly murders of attractive young white girls? So perhaps we should let them suffer--in fact, we should probably film it, so that Americans could download every tear, moan, and horrified scream at their new appearance.

The nice thing about the last strategy is that it doesn't require government intervention--free lance beauty socialists could give the rest of America a big boost in net happiness with every jar of acid they toss.

All right, so we're not going to do this.

But why is this so much more horrifying than the idea of taking the fruits of people's labours--most of which were gotten fairly honesty, by dint of hard work and delayed gratification (even if those efforts got a big boost from education etc.) Is it that beauty is somehow more worthy than wealth? The pursuit of wealth has allowed the masses to escape, as Robert Fogel noted, "From hunger and premature death". The pursuit of beauty has brought us jogging . . . and Slim-fast and six-inch-heels and toupees and expensively educated surgeons who spend their days sucking fat out of their clients' thighs.

Or is it that the body is more sacred than the wallet? Do not most of today's wealthy make their money by presenting their body at work for many hours a day, and labouring with their minds, which are far more sacred to any rational person than their limbs or cheeks?

No, I think the reason that we recoil is that it is repulsive to make people suffer just because others enjoy it. And it is horifying to give free reign to our worst impulses through the power of the state. The quest for autonomy, the thirst for knowlege, the desire to live a cleaner, healthier, richer life, free of hunger and want . . . these are the sorts of values we want our government to express and empower. Envy is not.

McArdle scolding people who make up data:

I think one of the biggest problems facing economists, and to some degree other social scientists, is the feeling that if you're just a little bit willing to fudge facts, you could do a great deal of good. If you'd torture the numbers just a little--not even torture, really, just waterboarding and a few stress positions--you could convince people to do what you know, deep in your heart, is the right thing. If you produce numbers showing that tax cuts increase tax revenue, or the minimum wage increases jobs, or GDP doubles for every 10% increase in the salaries of economists--why, you ccould do a whole world of good.

The subtler version of this is confirmation bias: to a libertarian analyst, papers showing that taxation causes people to stop working make perfect intuitive sense, while papers suggesting that stiff environmental legislation saves lives and money set off a pulse-racing, heart-pounding determination to discover just where the author went wrong. That liberal blogger to whom I referred earlier is a person of integrity and charm, and I have no doubt that they are trying to evaluate the data honestly--but I also have no doubt that they were heavily predisposed to believe the studies showing gay adoptions are good. I pause again to reiterate that this is not a vice more distributed on one side of the political spectrum or the other; it is a human vice, and no one struggles with it more mightily than I.
My humble suggestion is that it would do the blogosphere, and our blood pressure, a world of good if we didn't try so hard. I happen to think that extremely heavy progressive taxation has economic costs to those on the bottom of the income distribution that far outweigh its benefits. (Just to be clear, I do not think that taxation in the US currently fits this description; the problem with our tax code is that it's ludicrously complex, not that it's progressive.) It's nice that this is so. But I would be against very heavy taxation even if it made GDP grow, because I have a fundamental moral problem with compelling anyone to spend more of their time earning income for the state than they do for themselves. A willingness to state that firmly should give me some freedom to approach the study of tax policy without a burning need to make the numbers support my opinions.

There are many questions in economics which yield absolute answers (at least, they could): how interest rates work, whether asset markets are efficient, whether you should buy a lottery ticket*. There are some policies, such as hyperinflation and rent control, that pretty much all economists agree are a bad idea. But most of the questions that people want economics to answer cannot be resolved by building a better dataset, or improving our formula. Economics can give us tools to assess the effects of all sorts of policies, from legalising abortion to distributing free lunches. But it cannot tell us whether the costs outweigh the benefits. Nor can psychology, sociology, or what have you. It's riskier to argue the values than the numbers . . . but safer for all of us in the long run.

McArdle and Stuart Buck, in an article in the DC Examiner, on innumerate journalists:

When we wrote this up on our blogs, many conservative readers attributed the misleading figures to liberal media bias. But it is more likely ignorance than malice. Every year, scores of fledgling journalists pour out of liberal arts programs. Though many will need to pick through mountains of statistics in search of the truth, few have been taught the skills to do it.
They quickly become victims of advocacy groups pushing skewed statistics. Through ignorance, they may also start manufacturing their own flawed numbers. Since number-crunching beats (such as business and finance) are generally viewed as a tedious waystation en route to more interesting beats, few are enthusiastic about developing these skills. And their editors may not be in any position to help them.

The problem is compounded by the fact that journalists who do know how to read a balance sheet, run a regression, or analyze economic data, can generally get a job that pays a lot more than journalism. Some stay in the field out of love for their work (journalism is a really great job), but in our experience some of the best flee to greener pastures.

Even worse, as mathematician John Allen Paulos is fond of pointing out, Americans are often too innumerate to analyze statistics printed in the newspaper. America’s schools haven’t given its citizens any more ability than its journalists to analyze the information that floods our lives. We would call it a case of the blind leading the blind, but the comparison is inappropriate. Blind people know they can’t see.

Klinging To The Money

Hip middle-aged libertarians do not support racism. They merely support people who support ideas that support racism. Arnold Kling:

I think that President Obama set the bar ridiculously low when he said that 75 percent of the stimulus should kick in within by the end of 2010, but the House bill did not even get over that bar. Why is the stimulus bill so filled with non-stimulus while it omits real stimulus measures, such as cutting payroll taxes? 

I think the answer is that it is a reparations bill, not a stimulus bill. People who pay income taxes tend to vote Republican. People who live off taxes tend to vote Democratic. To the Democrats, the Bush tax cuts were a heinous evil, comparable to Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality in World War I. Now, they are demanding reparations, with hundreds of billions of dollars to be paid into teachers unions and other members of the coalition that won the election. 

Most of the bill makes no sense from a stimulus perspective. But all of it makes sense from a reparations perspective. 

[UPDATE: comments have been turned off. Apparently, some other blogger decided that my reference to "reparations" was a reference to reparations from slavery and hence a reference to the color of President Obama's skin. That had not occurred to me. I really was thinking about the Treaty of Versailles. But the comments were getting ugly.]

Kling thought he was being clever by using Germany's violation of Belgian rights as an example of reparations. Sure, he was using a loaded word but he was not loading the word with meaning, right? His meaning was perfectly clear: Obama was trying to pass an economic stimulus bill because he wanted to give money to Democratic voters to punish Republicans who gave tax cuts to themselves.  This is, of course, nonsensical, but if you believe that the economy did not need stimulus after the crash it makes perfect sense. And Kling has a basic philosophical dislike of government spending, not a racist dislike, right?

Kling begins somberly: “I think about what’s going on as an economist but I feel it as a father. My wife and I have three daughters between the ages of 19 and 25. And when I see what’s being done to their future I’m really angry. Back in September when they were talking about taking $700 billion dollars to unclog the financial system I wanted to yank Henry Paulson out of the TV screen and say to him: “Keep your hands off my daughter’s future.” But he got away with it. For me it felt like sitting there watching my home being ransacked by a gang of thugs. And now we’ve got a new gang of thugs and they are doing the same thing. So that’s how I feel, now back to how I think.” 

Kling says this is a big bill, but not a big stimulus. There is nothing timely, targeted, or temporary about it. It is a simple transfer of money from one set of people to favored interest groups of the Democratic Party.

Actually, Kling was a lot more nuanced at the time. He said some banks should be bailed out and some (maybe as few as 5) should be allowed to go under and worried that his view would not give enough support to foreign banks. He did not clutch his daughters and threaten Henry Paulson. Why pretend he did? Why did he feel the need to exaggerate his dislike of the stimulus when it was very clear that he disliked any government spending? Why did he discuss the bank bailouts rationally (for him) but use highly racially charged words for Obama's stimulus?--unless he thought playing on the racism of others would help him win his losing argument.

When Kling thought of favored interest groups of the Democratic Party, surely he was not just thinking of  African-American members of the Democratic Party. No doubt he was just as upset at the thought of stimulus going to women or gays or immigrants, who are all too poor to pay taxes and all vote Democrat.  It did not even occur to him that Obama was African-American, America was discussing reparations for slavery, and some Democratic voters are African-American, right?

We have three issues here: (1)Kling says he is not racist while using racially charged words. (2)All of Kling's proposals will hurt the poor and African-Americans are disproportionately poor. (3)We have not yet proven that Kling wants African-Americans to suffer merely because they are a different race.

What we are seeing is a contempt for the poor and powerless that is so profound it almost transcends race. It's possible that Kling is racist-he gives no proof otherwise-but any racism is almost secondary. It's the poor whom Kling despises. It is not true that "People who pay income taxes tend to vote Republican. People who live off taxes tend to vote Democratic."

Soylent writes:

"That point is very powerful rhetorically. But is it true?"
Not only no, but hell no!
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html
With few exceptions the states that recieve more federal spending than they pay in federal taxes are red states; Colorado and Nevada being the only notable exceptions that I can see. 

Kling is attempting to manipulate his readers using their greed as well as racism to win. Kling might or might not be racist but it is his overt dismissal of the 99% is 100% clear.

Rob:  So in this new adaptive economy, will we see like we've seen over the past two years with the recent recession, that some attribute to lax regulation and maybe some reckless business practices, in this new adaptive economy will there be the standards to keep that from happening?  

Arnold:  Ah, no!  Failure is going to happen in an adaptive economy.  Joseph Schumpeter used the term creative construction.  What we say in our book is that there's been this...at an economic 1.0 level, there's this conflict of, you know, people say, well markets work, let's use markets and other people say, no, markets fail, we need government and what we say is that markets fail and that's why we need markets.  That is, yes, markets fail a lot, there's individual failure, sometimes there's a collective failure as we saw with the financial crisis but the best way for the economy to adapt to the market failures is for markets to sort of pick themselves up and start over.  So new innovators are really what, people are wondering where the next jobs are going to come from, well they'll come from innovations.  Maybe the iPad will create an ecology of innovation around it.  People developing applications for it or more likely it will be something else; some innovation that we haven't thought of.  People still hope for great innovations in biotechnology or innovations in energy and so on.  

Rob:  How do we resist what we've done in recent times of privatizing profits then socializing the losses like we've seen in the past years.  What I'm speaking of is the financial bailout.    

Arnold:  My concern there is that what we have in Wall Street and in Washington is sort of the equivalent of the country club.  Where the country club members are very supportive of one another and don't recognize people on the outside.  Because the people who say the financial crisis coming were real outsiders.  These were people who didn't have the right ability to get along at places like Goldman-Sacs and so on.  It's interesting as you read the books that are coming out about the hedge fund managers who bet against the bad mortgages, these were people who just were not part of the this country club.  And some how we've got to break this country club control over finance and government so that we really benefit from points of view that are outside this sort of this insider country club point of view.  

So far so good, right? Mr. Kling is such a reasonable person, isn't he? Who doesn't want corporate/political control to decrease?

Rob:  I'd like to hear what you think about a recent comment by former presidential candidate, Ron Paul, when he said that there's really not a dimes worth of difference between Republications and Democrats and he lumped them all into a group called, corporatists.  

Arnold:  Well that phrase, corporatists, is, I think it's the biggest concern that I have right now about where the economy is headed and where Washington is headed.  That is a real focus on just the few large financial firms and central control from government and I think that term is an apt term.  I hope that there will turn out to be differences between Democrats and Republicans but one of the new books that I have, sort of assumes that that will be a problem that neither party really has, ultimately, a solution.  That what we really need is to think about ways to decentralize government and create, and this is kind of a far out idea, it may almost sound like science fiction, but forms of competitive government.  And ideas I have along those lines would be letting people allocate their own tax money to the charitable causes of their choice as opposed to having it allocated by Congress for them.  So these are kind of far out ideas to sort of make government a more competitive process.  Make it easier for people to opt into different governments, different regulatory structures and to sort of make use of what Detokville called the American tendency to form private associations.  We're a great country for forming private associations to solve problems.  We don't necessarily need a central government trying to solve every problem.  In fact, the, I see the central government as being very clumsy in it's attempt to solve problems.

Most unfortunately it appears the respectable Mr. Kling is an idiot. That is utterly illogical. Kling has a PhD in economics from MIT. He is not stupid but as we very well know, libertarians are often forced to look stupid in the service of their masters.  As we can see with Kling's race problem, it doesn't matter if he actually believes what he says. What matters is how much economic damage he can create for his employers, the Koch-created Cato Institute.

  Rob:  While politically unpopular, and certainly immeasurable tragedy on a personal level, have there been too many home foreclosures or maybe not enough home foreclosures?  

Arnold:  My view is that we need more.  That's actually what I said at the hearing is that by trying to mitigate the crisis, they're actually keeping the crisis in front of us when we really need it to be behind us.  You know, obviously, foreclosure is a painful process for individuals, but people can move on and there are so many people who stand to benefit from having the crisis behind us.  I mean, above all there are people who could buy homes and here the government is trying to do it's best to sort of keep home prices up so that home buyers in some sense are being cheated.  It's as if the only people that the government cares about are people who, right now, want to sell.  But for everyone who wants to sell right now, there are people who want to buy and you're not making them better off by trying to keep home prices up.  And I think people in general will be in better shape when there's a natural balance of supply and demand and people don't have to think about well how many houses in this neighborhood have people who are just on the borderline between foreclosure and not.  And one of the things that these loan modifications do is they keep them right on the borderline.  A lot of these people are going to default again and they're just being set up to fail.  That's not a productive situation.  

The homeowners who were victimized or unlucky or foolish or greedy are utterly unimportant. We need to move on and focus on the people with money who want to buy houses. Everyone will be better off if the poorer homeowners lost their homes in forclosure and got out of the way of the rich's profits.

Rob:  Like many states, Oklahoma is facing a fairly significant budget gap and as severe as it is, it would almost be three times as large if it wasn't for the stimulus dollars that are coming in to all the states and here in Oklahoma.  While the stimulus package has been criticized for not creating jobs has it in fact saved a lot of jobs certainly in the public sector?  

Arnold: Well, my concern with that is that there's another way to save jobs in the public sector and of course this never gets me any popularity when I say it, but you could cut salaries in the public sector, right.  If you have to cut your budget by ten percent, cut salaries by ten percent.  You're not going to lose workers and people will be unhappy and I'm not saying that public sector workers have done something to deserve it, but this is the economy we're in.  If you're in the private sector, you know, people haven't been earning as much.  People are losing jobs.  So if you're company is losing money, as a worker, you're going to hurt sooner or later and if your state government is losing money, as a worker, you know, you probably ought to expect to be hurting sooner or later.   

Rob: Thank you for your insights.

If the private sector is suffering, make sure that the public sector is suffering as well. That'll solve the problem of dramatically curtailed spending in a consumer-spending-based economy. Again, Kling is not stupid. He is merely an employee doing his job. Kling's personal racism or lack of it is very secondary to his role as a servant of the elite, doing his best to create economic hardships for the poor no matter what their identity is. He makes many reasonable arguments against the collusion of the powerful but his libertarian policies would benefit only the very wealthy. Someone who wanted to end the collusion between finance and government does not advise the dissolution of government for the betterment of the people. It takes a Koch employee to do that.

The (Possible!) Racism Of Megan McArdle

Since Megan McArdle saw fit to lionize racist asshole Andrew Sullivan, let's take a little look at her opinion of African-Americans.

First, the praise for Sully.

Long ago, when blogging was a fresh new form that attracted a lot of chin-stroking journalism, Glenn Reynolds said something that stuck with me: Journalism is a lecture; blogging is a conversation. That's not as true as it used to be, and it gets less true every day, as old bloggers leave and are not replaced. Ezra Klein attributes much of this to social media, which is certainly part of the answer; Facebook does not reward Part Seven of a back-and-forth about affirmative action. It wants neat, self-contained, authoritative statements about The Way the World Is, preferably ones that bolster your ideological commitments by eschewing caveats, ambiguity or serious engagement with the other side. As I frequently joke with my writer friends, the ideal blog post for the social media world would be headlined: "Everything You Already Believe Is Completely Correct, and Here's Some Math You Won't Understand That Proves It."

I imagine that a number of bloggers breathed a sigh of relief when the form became less conversational -- no need to respond to all those uncomfortable questions the other side is raising! The great thing about Andrew was that he kept up the conversation. He is passionate in argument, and he and I have had some fierce disagreements over the years. But right up to the end, he kept asking uncomfortable questions and offering answers from both sides. That's pretty rare, and pretty admirable, and I'm deeply sad that one last vestige of the old days is soon to be no more.

Those liberals were not even willing to discuss the genetic inferiority of African-Americans! But perhaps McArdle was not referring to Sullivan's racist beliefs? Well, she has discussed the matter in the past as well.

Lunch hour questions
One more post before I go back to work.

I'm reading the excellent Left Hooks, Right Crosses, a collection of political writing from left and right edited by the inimitable Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Caldwell. There are a number of essays on The Bell Curve, which I have read. I am the only person I know who has done so, and also, the only person I know without an opinion on its veracity. I keep meaning to re-read it, and see if I form an opinion, but I haven't the time.

What struck me is this: the arguments against the Bell Curve seem, overall, to be very poor. I recall reading Stephen Jay Gould's piece on it in the New Yorker, which literally flabbergasted me; it seemed such an obvious fabrication of selective quotation, half-truths, and statistical mumbo-jumbo that any reader who had read the Bell Curve would indignantly reject it. But of course, no one did reject it. No one read the book. They took Stephen Jay Gould's word for it, because he was Stephen Jay Gould. (I want to state here that this was a long time ago, and without access to Lexis-Nexis, I'm going on memory; it's possible that the piece is better than I remember it. But while it's possible I got the statistics wrong, I recall several instances of really egregious selective quotation that couldn't have been accidental. If SJG needed to resort to such tactics to refute the work, how right could he really have been?)

The strongest item I've seen is questioning the separated-twin studies from which Herrenstein and Murray draw their conclusions; several pieces argued that twins who were allegedly raised in different environments were in fact being kept by close family members. This is very important, and would be even stronger if the writers had mentioned how many children out of the study were being kept near each other.

All the pieces against them were marred by gratuitous name calling and vitriolic denunciations of anyone who would even consider the possibility that such a thing were true. I don't recall enough detail about the book to have an opinion one way or another. But as Charles Murtaugh often says, the world is not here to please you. It is possible that there are vast, heritable differences in IQ. It's also possible that there aren't. The problem that no one seems to have addressed is what we're supposed to do if, as Murray argues, IQ is important, even if none of it is hereditary.

The problem with environment is that, from what I know, it seems to be most important in the years before seven, in terms of actually shaping aptitude. And the overwhelmingly important environment is home.

[yip yip yip]

So while people who attacked the idea that IQ is strongly heritable seem to think that this makes the problem less intractable, I'd say it makes it rather more. We're going to have genetic engineering to overcome the former within the next hundred years, I'd bet. But I think we'd all be frightened of the kind of social engineering that would overcome the latter.

 The Gould response destroying The Bell Curve was a thing of beauty and McArdle's criticism of it is wrong and inane. But the more important point is McArdle's bland assertion that it's possible that African-Americans are genetically inferior to White Americans, she's not sure yet because she hasn't formed an opinion, which she might do if she studies it matter further. And the people who said that the book was wrong were biased or didn't read it.

Normal people would dismiss any claims of white genetic superiority out of hand. Not only is the belief in African-American genetic inferiority scientific nonsense, but it's obviously untrue as well. From an article by Sam Pritchard, in regard to Jonathan Chait's whining about criticism on Twitter:

  Let me explain what it means to believe that an average IQ of 85 accurately represents the inborn intelligence of the black population of America. It means that 16% of black people—one in seven—are intellectually disabled, or what used to be called “mentally retarded.” It means that one in four African Americans are borderline intellectually disabled. It means that nearly half of Sub-Saharan Africans are intellectually disabled. And it means that this is all the unavoidable genetic destiny of black people. Suddenly, Saletan’s position doesn’t seem so reasonable after all, and one can see how black thinkers like Brittney Cooper or Ta-Nehisi Coates find it impossible and unreasonable.  

As Coates eloquently put it, it becomes apparent that entertaining this notion as reasonable requires living “in the world of myth” that privilege allows people like Saletan to inhabit. Actually knowing a substantial number of black people on an intimate level (as Coates and Cooper do) would have surely shown Saletan, prior to writing his ill-advised and vile column, that such arguments were flatly nonsensical. One can also see why black thinkers like Coates and Cooper are unwilling to engage such ideas respectfully; that someone could treat such ideas as plausible suggests an irreconcilable gap in fundamental knowledge, values, worldview, and experiences. 

            So Chait, by arguing that all ideas merit the respect of good-faith Enlightenment discourse, exhibits dishonesty. He, like all human beings, excludes many positions from his notion of what is reasonable, and dismisses them summarily. He even does it within the very piece where he pleads for a democratic ideal of reasoned discourse in which his ideas are never dismissed—and, incredibly, some of the ideas he rejects flippantly are indeed reasonable. Chait shrugs off these ideas perhaps more subtly and in a more tonally-restrained style than the PC discourse he criticizes, but it is no less galling to those being dismissed, and it is no less a tactic of ideological policing. Again, we find that Chait is primarily uncomfortable with being subject to the dismissal that he, as a centrist, assumed he was entitled to dole out and immune from receiving. That assumption is so ingrained that he doesn’t even recognize his own language as the dismissive policing of ideology that it is.

McArdle also decided that Those People  (you know who) were poor because they didn't marry and they didn't marry because Those Male People were too, shall we say, hypersexualized which no doubt just appears to be a racist trope.

I've been doing a lot of research on poverty and inequality recently, and one of the major factors behind both turns out to be having kids out of wedlock.

... 

There's clearly a subculture in our society for which the marriage ethos -- the social pressure on women, and particularly on men, to get married, or be in a long term relationship that looks in all important respects very like marriage -- has been destroyed. 

My own time in the inner city leaves me with some sympathy for what the Bush plan is trying to achieve. Inner-city kids want and need dads, and while marriage is no panacea (Ken's parents were married), stable marriages are the surest way to provide them. Expanding economic opportunity is clearly a big part of the solution, but probably not the answer in whole, given the hurdles to fatherhood and marriage posed by community norms. Wanting to marry only when you can do it on a tropical beach is like wanting to work only when you can start at $100,000 a year -- that is, not to want it in any meaningful sense. Even as teenagers, Jewell's and Angie's kids talk of wanting kids someday, but dismiss marriage out of hand. ''That'd be too plain -- like you'd have to see the same woman every day,'' Jewell's son Tremmell said. Angie's son DeVon, who is 16, said, ''I need some little me's''- children. But, he added, ''I just can't see myself being with one woman.'' One lesson of the 90's -- from the declines in smoking and teenage pregnancy to the plunging welfare rolls -- is that cultural signals matter, so even public-education campaigns aren't to be dismissed out of hand.

Poor women want to get married just as much as middle class women do, but the social environment they live in just doesn't seem to enable it. Marriage seems to be better for everyone, but can the institution regenerate itself? And if not, what can? Predictibly, I don't expect any government campaign to amount to much -- the government is best at writing checks, not changing people, and besides, my skin gets all crawly when the government starts telling people how to live. But what then?

 Megan McArdle would never call an African-American a bad name or attempt to lynch one. She would just do her very best to ensure that they suffer for their "choices." Incentives matter, you know.

How does Megan McArdle form these opinion? Fortunately she let us know recently.

But the problem with the old model of blogging is not just social media; it's that blogging is exhausting. Two or three items a day doesn't sound like a lot, but it takes a long time just to find something you want to write about. And the slowly dying ecosystem of other blogs makes it harder, because there's no longer a conversation you can just easily hook into. Instead of plopping yourself down at a table where people are already talking, you have to wander through a room filled with people who are speaking to an audience through a megaphone and decide which of these oratorial topics might interest your own audience and a few thousand of their Facebook friends. It's much lonelier, and consumes more energy, than it was in days of yore. This is why I spend so much time on my comments section; it is the one remainder of the old back-and-forth that made me love blogging in the first place. 

Most of us, one way or another, stopped doing what we used to do. I write fewer, longer items; others stopped blogging entirely. Andrew kept up the volume, even increased it, but by the end, it took a staff of 10 to do it. It's no wonder he burned out; the wonder is that it took so long.

  
Once upon a time McArdle could depend on Andrew Sullivan and Charles Murray to find out just how inferior African-Americans actually are. Instead of echoing whatever other conservatives blog about,  McArdle is now forced to find her own topics and boy, is it tedious! Not that she would ever give up the money. It beats working for a living.

This is the method by which McArdle decided that we could never impede the drug corporations' search for ever-higher profits. She just knew it had to be true even if she really didn't know. Her authorities said so.

Why I am desperately, desperately afraid of Kerry's health care plan

Alex Tabarrok tells us what sort of effect price controls are likely to have on pharmaceutical development:

Acemoglu and Linn's paper is formally about a different issue; the effect of market size on innovation. What they find is that a 1 percent increase in the potential market size for a drug leads to an approximately 4 percent increase in the growth rate of new drugs in that category. In other words, if you are sick it is better to be sick with a common disease because the larger the potential market the more pharmaceutical firms will be willing to invest in research and development. Misery loves company. 

Although they don't mention it, this finding has implications for price controls. In the pharmaceutical market the major costs are all fixed costs (they don't vary much with market size) so profit =P*Q-F. Acemoglu and Linn look at changes in Q but a 1% change in P has exactly the same effects on profits, and thus presumably on R&D, as a 1% change in Q.
 

We can expect, therefore, that a 1% reduction in price will reduce the growth rate of new drug entries by 4% and a 10% reduction in price will reduce new drug entries by 40%. That is a huge effect. I suspect that the authors have overestimated the effect but even if it were one-half the size would you be willing to trade a 10% reduction in price for a 20% reduction in the growth rate of new drugs? No one who understands what these numbers mean would think that is a good deal.

As someone who is hoping to extend her lifespan, and quality of life, through the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals, this is frankly terrifying. I am currently enjoying unparalleled lung health through a new drug, Singulair, that might well not have been developed if even modest price controls were in place; family members and friends are similarly excited about Advair, the combination bronchiodilator/steroid which is also a new development.

I probably will not vote for either Kerry or Bush. But as I consider whether one might be the lesser of two evils, I am struck by the fact that my disagreements with Bush are basically short term ones, which are unlikely to substantially outlast his administration, the conduct of the war on Iraq being chief among them. (Or they are things on which there is basically no daylight between him and John Kerry).  

Oh, his foriegn policy decisions will certainly have lasting repercussions, but I don't think that they will be as long-lasting as the repercussions if John Kerry succeeds in further nationalising health care, or as John Kerry's supreme court appointments are likely to be. Is it worth it to give up future drug advancements in order to punish Bush for screwing up in Iraq? I'm surprised at how few people seem to be seriously considering this question.
 

Megan McArdle worked her butt off to destroy Obamacare because she thought she might suffer if others were helped. The political is personal. Her views on the (possible!) inferiority of African-Americans is based on the conservative drivel she read, which she assumed was correct because it told her wanted she wanted to hear.

Contractually Obligatory Friday Filler Post

Shorter Megan McArdle: Paying someone to cook your steak is a waste of money. You are much better off spending hundreds of dollars on equipment to cook it yourself, using the most complicated method possible.

Longer:

The problem with ordering steak out is that the chef doesn't do much to it. It's expensive, but it's expensive because the raw ingredient -- which is to say, steak -- is expensive. At most places, all the chef does is season a pre-cut hunk of meat, expose it to heat for a little while, and maybe plop some butter on top to make it taste extra-succulent. You can do all these things at home. It takes little skill, and it creates almost no mess. In other words, you aren't getting much added benefit from going to the restaurant. So don't pay someone else premium prices for minimal work; make them spend hours prepping and cooking you that wild boar ragu. 

If you want a dry-aged steak, you can do it at home with a mini-fridge in the basement or garage. Dying for a fancy bearnaise sauce? You can make it in the blender. If you're having trouble getting the meat cooked exactly to a turn, buy a sous vide setup, which is so foolproof that you literally cannot screw up the cooking; no matter the thickness of the steak, it will turn out absolutely perfect, every time. All in, the entire kit -- sous vide, mini fridge, blender, vacuum sealer, and a hibachi or cast-iron frying pan to put a sear on -- will set you back less than $500 new, which is to say, less than a couple of steak dinners for four. And you can probably slash that by at least half by shopping garage sales. Then get some good steaks -- by mail order if your local grocery store is truly abysmal -- and have yourself that celebratory steak feast. Total active time spent cooking should be well under half an hour. And if you don't want to do the dishes, you can use fancy paper plates. 

Yes, investing in such a setup will cost you more than a single steak at a restaurant. But then it will keep generating delicious dry-aged steaks for years. Those are years that you will be able to spend eating restaurant food that actually would be difficult, or annoying, to replicate at home, while also enjoying a great steak from time to time. Or if your idea of a great meal is always and forever "steak," you can skip the restaurant entirely and save thousands. I can do a top-notch steak dinner for eight at home for less than it would cost to take the two of us out for a mediocre piece of beef, and without much greater effort.

Remember, she's a "vegetarian" even if she eats meat.

The Rich Are Poor And The Poor Are Rich

Megan McArdle wants you to know that her friends don't feel nearly as rich as everyone else thinks they are and that's perfectly understandable. After all, we compare ourselves to the people around us.

As I noted last week, one reason people with these advantages don't feel rich is that they compare themselves to the people they know -- and if you are a highly educated professional, things like "children attend a selective four-year school" do not feel like a great gift that they are, with rare good fortune, able to provide their children; they feel like the very barest baseline for a decent existence. Virtually everyone I know went to a selective college, and indeed, so did most of their parents. So it comes to seem as if preparing your children for the same must be the struggle of all people, rather than the province of a fairly privileged class ... and it therefore seems odd that you're having trouble paying for it all on what sounds like a very good income. It's easy to forget that without that income, you wouldn't even be thinking about it.

That said, I think there are some other reasons that 30- and 40-ish professionals in places like New York City don't feel as rich as they ought. ... It's still true that affluent people are purchasing quite a lot with their money, such as proximity to high-paying jobs. But it's also worth remembering that they have to allocate quite a lot of their high incomes to buying something that their lower-income neighbors already have -- and that this is one big reason why they don't feel that much richer than those neighbors.

However when the shrinking middle class compares themselves to the people around them, Megan McArdle wants you to know that they should be comparing themselves to a rural child of the Depression or the 19th century Dakotas or perhaps the prehistoric caves of Lascaux.

The average working-class family of 1901 had a few changes of clothes and a diet heavy on beans and grain, light on meat and fresh produce -- which simply wasn't available for much of the year, even if they'd had the money to afford it. Even growing up in the 1950s, in a comfortably middle-class home, my mother's wardrobe consisted of a week's worth of school clothes, a church dress and a couple of play outfits. Her counterparts today can barely fit all their clothes in their closets, even though today's houses are much bigger than they used to be; putting a family of five in a 900-square-foot house with a single bathroom was an aspirational goal for the generation that settled Levittown, but in an era when new homes average more than 2,500 square feet, it sounds like poverty.  

At that, even the people living in the last decades of the 19th century were richer than those who had gone before them. I remember coming across a Mauve Decade newspaper clipping that contained a description of my great-grandmother "going visiting" in some nearby town during the 1890s. On the other side of the clipping was a letter to the editor from a woman in her 90s, complaining that these giddy young things didn't know how good they had it compared to the old days -- why, they even bought their saleratus 1 from a store instead of making it from corncobs 2 like they did back when times were simpler and thrifty housewives knew the value of a dollar.  

Joni Ernst, who is just a few years older than me, had a much more affluent childhood than the generation that settled the prairies, and more affluent still than the generations before them. But in many ways, she was much poorer than the people making fun of her on Twitter, simply because so many goods have gotten so much more abundant. Not just processed foods and flat-screen televisions -- the favorite target of people who like to pooh-pooh economic progress. But good and necessary things such as shoes for your children and fresh vegetables to feed them, even in winter.  

In every generation, we forget how much poorer we used to be, and then we forget that we have forgotten. We focus on the things that seem funny or monstrous or quaint and darling. Somehow the simplest and most important fact -- the immense differences between their living standards and ours -- slides right past our eye. And when Ernst tried to remind us, people didn't say "Wow, we've really come a long way"; they pointed and laughed.

To make the long, long, long ago days of the 1950s-70s seem like the days of The Little Subsidized Farm In Iowa, McArdle has to, shall we say, bend the truth a little.  Why, her mother barely had a shoe to wear or a Sunday go-to-meetin' dress or a pot to piss in, back in the day! However, McArdle already told us that her mother's father was quite well off; in the comments of this post we see he was probably in the top 5% of income in the US at the time. Maybe McArdle's mother only had six dresses or skirts but that would have been by choice, not because "we had less then."

Parenthetically, I have researched vintage items from the '50s and '60s  and middle class girls and women had enough personal items to choke a horse. Women had hats, gloves, matching handbags, stockings, garter belts, slips, petticoats, foundation garments, belts, suits, dresses, evening dresses, and plenty more. Poor people always have had little but the middle classes are a different story.

While we are fact-checking, note that saleratus is potassium bicarbonate and was only briefly used as baking soda became widely available in the 1860s, and was not made from corncobs.

What is saleratus? Wood burnt to ashes. Ashes are lixiviated -- lye is the result . Lye is evaporated by boiling -- black salts are the residuum. The salts undergo a purification by fire, and the potash of commerce is obtained. By another process, we change the potash into pearlash. Now put this into sacks, and place them over a distillery wash-tub, where the fermentation evolves carbonic acid gas, and the pearlash absorbs and renders it sold, the product being heavier, dryer and whiter than the pearlash. It is now saleratus. How much salts of lye and carbonic acid can a human stomach bear and remain healthy, is a question for the saleratus eaters." -- The Adams Sentinel and General Advertiser. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Monday, 15 August 1853. Page 5.

Evidently it was typically made by chemists.

Remarks of the New England Farmer -- Storekeepers who have been engaged in the business for many years, have told us formerly they used to purchase three or four small kegs of saleratus for a year's supply in a country village, but that they now purchase more than as many large cases weighing six or eight hundred pounds each. Large quantities are used in making bread, the most common food, and of which all partake. Milk should take its place there. Many persons are in the habit of adding a little saleratus to most kinds of pastry. We are inclined to believe the remarks quoted above have much truth in them. We do not know how far the powder of saleratus may be neutralized by a mixture of other substances used as food, but it may be known by the chemist, and should be explained to the people.

Always wrong, never in doubt.

Always Wrong Never In Doubt

Nobody will be surprised to see that Megan McArdle is supporting the Koch candidate for president.

1. Absent some completely unpredictable event, like Bill Clinton's death, Hillary Clinton is not going to walk to the presidency; at best, she is going to have a hard fight on her hands.
2. Scott Walker starts looking like the candidate best positioned to take Clinton on: a regular guy, not an Ivy League technocrat, and one who has proven experience winning tough elections and curbing government spending.

McArdle, who is always wrong about everything ever, has decided that middle class economics is a losing issue.

The Obama administration is going in exactly the wrong direction with its "middle-class agenda," and this will hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016 unless she repudiates it. The middle class does not want to hear about all the awesome new spending they're going to get to help them out (did anyone cringe during the State of the Union speech when Obama identified a couple that needed help because they couldn't afford new cars and vacations?). The middle class wants to hear that they are going to be able to keep what they have.

McArdle is also evidently a Clinton truther.

robertlevine • 15 hours ago

...

Walker had a good week. But he's got lots of vulnerabilities. It's true that he's won three statewide elections in Wisconsin. But he's never faced the electorate he would face as a presidential candidate in 2016. Wisconsin hasn't voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan, if memory serves. Just because Walker is a local boy won't change that. It's hard to overstate the degree of loathing in which he's held by Democrats in Wisconsin. 

I suspect he's also got a glass jaw. He lives politically in a bubble; he's had a compliant legislature and judiciary and surprisingly little blowback from his dirty tricks habit. And there are persistent rumors that his career at Marquette University ended in scandal; perhaps confidentiality will prevent the facts from coming out, but I wouldn't bet on it. I don't think the other candidates are going to treat him with the deference that he's experienced from Republicans in Wisconsin. 

Having said that, he's the one that's the most scary. He regards opponents as enemies to be destroyed, not fellow citizens. If we have another 9/11, he's the one candidate from either party that would be itching to lock up dissidents.
 

McMegan robertlevine • an hour ago

• Unlike Hillary Clinton, who is well known for her kind and generous treatment of people who oppose her?

Months and months of McArdle supporting Walker will be fun. She will either have to come out of the Koch closet further or look like an idiot trying to support Walker without actually supporting Walker.

You Are Next

This article by Reihan Salam is exactly what I would expect to read from a Koch-supporter.

We often hear about the political muscle of the ultrarich. Billionaires like the libertarians Charles and David Koch and Tom Steyer, the California environmentalist who’s been waging a one-man jihad against the Keystone XL pipeline, have become bogeymen for the left and right respectively. The influence of these machers is considerable, no doubt. Yet the upper middle class collectively wields far more influence. These are households with enough money to make modest political contributions, enough time to email their elected officials and to sign petitions, and enough influence to sway their neighbors. Upper-middle-class Americans vote at substantially higher rates than those less well-off, and though their turnout levels aren’t quite as high as those even richer than they are, there are far more upper-middle-class people than there are rich people. One can easily turn the Kochs or the Steyers of the world into a big fat political target. It’s harder to do the same to the lawyers, doctors, and management consultants who populate the tonier precincts of our cities and suburbs.  

Another thing that separates the upper middle class from the truly wealthy is that even though they’re comfortable, they’re less able to take the threat of tax increases or benefit cuts in stride. Take away the mortgage interest deduction from a Koch brother and he’ll barely notice. Take it away from a two-earner couple living in an expensive suburb and you’ll have a fight on your hands. So the upper middle class often uses its political muscle to foil the fondest wishes of egalitarian liberals. This week offered a particularly vivid reminder of how that works. In the windup to his State of the Union address, Barack Obama released a proposal to curb the tax benefits associated with 529 college savings plans, which primarily benefit upper-middle-class families, to help finance the expansion of a separate tax credit that would primarily benefit lower-middle- and middle-middle-class families. Only 3 percent of households actually make use of these accounts, and 70 percent of the tax benefits go to households earning more than $200,000, so you can see why Obama might have thought no one would get too worked up about the proposal. If anything, he might have thought, and hoped, that his critics would get more exercised about his call for big capital gains tax increases, which would have allowed him to play the part of Robin Hood—a role Obama loves to play.

Once you have impoverished the 90% you are left with impoverishing the 9%. Maybe even the .9%; they have lots of money.  The Koch-Americans will take the newly poor and middle class's alarm over their economic condition and aim it at the upper-middle class, who shared in a relatively small part of the crash's bounty. The people with nearly all the money and power will thereby escape anything nasty such as taxation or (eventually)  mob violence.

This tactic worked like a charm in the past and will almost certainly work again. Conservatives and Democrats are accustomed to a two-party race guided by the backers of those parties. The Koches are not trying to work within the party to achieve the party's political goals. They are buying elections to achieve their own goals and will be buying authority along with power. Income inequality leaves the desperate open to strongmen and we could easily find ourselves with Scott Walker in the White House, making any previous imaginary Republican dire consequence seem like heaven in comparison.

Previews!

Oh, goodie. Megan McArdle is going to tell us that the poor aren't really poor, with the implication that income inequality is irrelevant, as she has stated repeatedly in the past.

Last week, in her State of the Union response, Jodi Ernst mentioned going to school with bread bags on her feet to protect her shoes. These sorts of remembrances of poor but honest childhoods used to be a staple among politicians -- that's why you've heard so much about Abe Lincoln's beginnings in a log cabin. But the bread bags triggered a lot of hilarity on Twitter, which in turn triggered this powerful meditation from Peggy Noonan on how rich we have become. So rich that we have forgotten things that are well within living memory:  

[snipped Noonan quote rhapsodizing about our boot-strapping, plastic-bag wrapping American past] 

I am a few years younger than Noonan, but I grew up in a very different world -- one where a number of my grammar school classmates were living in public housing or on food stamps, but everyone had more than one pair of shoes. In rural areas, like the one where Jodi Ernst grew up, this lingered longer. But all along, Americans got richer and things got cheaper -- especially when global markets opened up. Payless will sell you a pair of child's shoes for $15, which is two hours of work even at minimum wage.  

Perhaps that sounds like a lot to you -- two whole hours! But I've been researching historical American living standards for a project I'm working on, and if you're familiar with what Americans used to spend on things, this sounds like a very good deal.

Yes, America is much richer now except for small pockets in time and space that encompass the childhood of Republican politicians. Why, Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't have so much as a tin cup while we lucky Koch-Americans have processed food and flat-screen tvs. And the people who sniggered at Joni Ernst's bread bag story are actually laughing at the poor, plucky little prairie child  and the American Way of Life.

Propaganda For Sale

Megan McArdle, having failed abysmally in her attempt to engage Elizabeth Warren intellectually, has decided to breitbart her instead. It is a wise choice, if not a wise action, since McArdle approaches an intellectual battle armed only with a spatula and a wide-eyed look of innocence, relying on propaganda courage and pluck to win the day for her. It is much easier and even more lucrative to put negative words next to Elizabeth Warren's name and wait for authoritarian drives to work their magic. McArdle is Lucianne Goldberg in a bra.

Here at the Snark we concentrate on the small details but it is necessary to take a step back and look at the big picture. Megan McArdle campaigned tirelessly to help the elite and harm the poor financially. Her side won. The middle class has become poorer and the rich have become richer. Because of her actions and the actions of her masters, it is inevitable that we all will suffer more chaos, poverty and violence.

Why? The money, sure. But for McArdle it's personal as well. Political theory is a thin disguise for personal issues. On one of her many attacks on Warren, McArdle was pressed to an unusual degree to give proof of her assertions. Warren couldn't be right about medical bankruptcies; it had to be an increase in consumption that drove people to bankruptcy. Why was she so sure?

When my boyfriend lost his job, we stopped going out to dinner, cut back our grocery bills, turned down the thermostat, etc. If we had needed to, we would have broken our lease and moved. What didn't we cut? The payments on our cars and student loans. Had those been a higher percentage of our income, or if we had had a mortgage that needed both our incomes, things would have been a lot scarier.

This is not proof that people who were driven to bankruptcy spent their way into it bankruptcy but  Megan McArdle paid her debts and so will you. And she doesn't want to hear any nonsense about failure or poverty. She succeeded out of personal superiority and if you want to succeed you should just do what she tells you to do.

But in the mean time McArdle has a living to earn churning out propaganda.

Big Pharma Is A Pointless Target For Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren is not targeting Big Pharma, she is suggesting that its fines should help finance the NIH. Propagandists play on conservatives' feelings of victimization, a by-product of authoritarian control.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has a modest proposal for pharmaceutical companies that get fined by the Food and Drug Administration for rule violations: a sort of "swear jar" that will require them to give money to the National Institutes of Health every time they break the FDA's rules:

We are meant to call to mind Jonathan Swift's modest proposal and see Warren's actions as modest on the surface but horrific underneath. Propagandists try to use their enemies' weapons against them to both make use of them and undermine them.

Warren's bill, the Medical Innovation Act, would require large drug companies that reach a settlement with the government for breaking the law to pay a "small portion" of their profits over five years into a fund for research at the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. 

... "Fines for big drug companies have increasingly just become another cost of doing business," she said. 

The provisions in her bill would only apply to companies that reach a settlement with the federal government for breaking the law and that sell "blockbuster drugs" with more than $1 billion in annual sales.

She claims that this would result in roughly a $6 billion increase in the NIH's annual funding, or about 20 percent. 

What's not to like about sticking it to big, rich pharmaceutical firms in order to fund more of the government research that makes them rich? Who could be against that?

Propagandists pretend to engage the other side while having no intention of making an honest argument. They attempt to portray their enemies' strengths as weaknesses in order to attack those supposed weaknesses; here McArdle pretends that liberals want to stick it to rich corporations, implying that their motives are spiteful because they hate the rich. McArdle depends on the propaganda machine that she is part of to reassure her victims that liberals want regulation because they envy the successful since they are failures, not because corporations do anything wrong.

Her victims will suffer from the consequences but authoritarian wanna-be leaders are deluded as well; the poor and middle class think they can become rich despite the stacked deck but the rich delude themselves that they can become hedge-fund rich, rich enough to avoid the chaos they worked so diligently to create. So McArdle blathers on, confident in the everlasting protection of her masters.

So glad you asked.

There are a few problems with Warren's proposal, starting with the fact that it seems to assume that the NIH is the ultimate source of all those Big Pharma profits, which is why some of those profits should be transferred to the NIH to fund "the next generation of medical research."

Propagandists use weasel words to evade responsibility for their slick insinuations. Warren:

"It’s like a swear jar: Whenever a huge drug company that is generating enormous profits as a result of federal research investments gets caught breaking the law — and wants off the hook — it has to put some money in the jar to help fund the next generation of medical research," Warren said.

Of course Warren is saying that when companies that made enormous profits off of federal research break the law to make more money, part of that money should go to federal research. McArdle does not say "some of its fines." She says "some of its profits," hoping to encourage her readers to feel sympathy towards the poor businessmen whose profits were confiscated by that commie Elizabeth Warren. "Corporate profits" are a much more positive thing than "criminal fines."

 Warren's bill, the Medical Innovation Act, would require large drug companies that reach a settlement with the government for breaking the law to pay a "small portion" of their profits over five years into a fund for research at the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.

In fact, academic research -- most of it presumably NIH-funded -- accounts for only about a quarter of new drugs. The majority are discovered by pharma or biotech firms.

Those drugs probably depend on government research.

 The Role of Federal Research and Development 

The federal government spent more than $25 billion on health-related R&D in 2005. Only some of that spending is explicitly related to the development of new pharmaceuticals. 

However, much of it is devoted to basic research on the mechanisms of disease, which underpins the pharmaceutical industry’s search for new drugs. The primary rationale for the government to play a role in basic research is that private companies perform too little such research themselves (relative to what is best for society). In general, the information generated by basic research can be readily replicated at low cost. Thus, many of the benefits of that research accrue not to the company that performs it but to the public and to other firms. With pharmaceuticals, those spillover benefits can be significant because the development of new drugs depends on scientific advances. Federal funding of basic research directly stimulates the drug industry’s spending on applied research and development by making scientific discoveries that expand the industry’s opportunities for R&D.

Pharma says it invests about 20% of sales in R&D domestically. The government spends a lot on R&D and much less producing new drugs. Pharma does the opposite. McArdle conveniently leaves out half of the equation because propagandists need dishonest arguments  to persuade their victims. McArdle doesn't want her victims to think about the government's contribution so she minimizes it in any way she can.

However, there are also technical problems with Warren's proposal:

A highly variable funding source is not the best way to go about paying for basic research. You don't want the dollar value of grants to swing wildly every few years, which could end up choking useful products just as they're starting to bear fruit.

McArdle dishonestly insinuates government research will depend on drug company fines instead of appropriations.

It's not all that likely that Congress would let that money stay with the NIH. A more likely outcome is that it will simply reduce NIH appropriations to offset the new fines.

You can't use funds from corrupt drug companies because of corrupt Republican politicians.

If fines should be higher on pharma violations -- and maybe they should be -- then we already have two very good ways of achieving that: Congress can mandate them, or regulators can impose them. A percentage-of-profits surcharge is not a good alternative. For one thing, you're going to end up fining companies based on how profitable they are, not how serious violation was -- you could easily have a situation in which an unprofitable company that committed grave violations ends up paying nothing, while a profitable one that's guilty of less serious offenses contributes a great deal to the NIH coffers. This is neither just nor efficient.

 She just said Congress won't let the NIH have the fines. Why would they mandate higher ones?

A fine is not a "percentage of profits surcharge."

Only billion dollar companies are targeted.

Nearly every word she says is a lie or elision.

If you make pharmaceutical companies pay a hefty surcharge in exchange for settling with the government, then fewer companies are going to settle with the government.Cases will drag out, costing the government money, and the government may ultimately lose some of them. You have to net this out of any gain you project for the NIH.

Nobody can do anything ever.

Why just big companies with blockbuster drugs? Are rule violations somehow less upsetting at generics manufacturers or ones that make specialty drugs?

 

Now she's just punting.

This strikes me as less of a serious proposal and more of a populist gesture aimed at tickling the fancy of people who think that large corporations are all leeches and that all good things come out of government-sponsored research. It's hard to blame a politician for playing to her base. But we shouldn't join the performance, either.

Of course it does. She's a lying propagandist. And she wants her victims to spend all their time and energy hating on their political enemies instead of realizing that they are handing over their money to the rich.

The Auto Seems To Be Popular Now But It Will Never Replace The Horse

Megan  McArdle from The Beginning Of Time until the implementation of Obamacare: Obamacare will never work.

Megan McArdle During Implementation: A rocky roll out proves Obamacare will never work.

Megan McArdle Now: Sure, Obamacare seems to be working now but it won't work in the future.

Compared to last year, Obamacare's 2015 open enrollment is a boring story -- no spectacular IT failures, no politically charged policy cancellations. And as Obamacare wends to the end of its second open-enrollment period, it would seem that we should know more about the shape of the final program. What have we learned so far?

The answer is "less than you'd think." Here's what we do know so far. There have been about 7.8 million confirmed enrollments or renewals in qualified health plans. Vermont is not going to have single payer. More insurers are entering many markets, but some insurers have already run into trouble. Data on the uninsured is somewhat scarce, but my best guess, based on the Gallup numbers, is that about 4 percent of the population has gotten insured since Obamacare started, or roughly 10 million to 12 million people.

On the other hand, much about the future of the Affordable Care Act remains murky.

No doubt that murkiness will spiral into a death darkness, or whatever doom-and-gloom bullshit she comes up with next.

Our Post-Democratic World

This article in The New Yorker about Jeb Bush and his connections to commercializing education is frightening.  It is possible we will be unable to keep the .01% from stealing our schools and I suspect they will get away with it because too many people assume that they will never be affected and would enjoy watching their "enemies" suffer the consequences of their inferiority.

Women who had to beg in the streets for money to feed their babies will keep their legs closed, we hear. Women are lazy and if they are not helped they will be forced to marry or get a job.  Shiftless men will be forced to work. Moral values will return. Communities will be strengthened.

For-profit schools will operate for profit. We know that every single business has a duty to its owners/shareholders to make as much profit as possible. The logical conclusion is the elimination of actual schools for virtual ones. The parents alone will be responsible for the education of their children, as all rugged individualists should.

ADDED: Batocchio quotes MLK in an article at Hullabaloo.

 If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.

 
When your self-image is based on your position in your authoritarian hierarchy, you guard that position with your life and take every opportunity to strengthen it.

And you always follow the money. Eliminating public schools heavily undercuts the Democratic party, women, minorities and makes it easier for the .01% to get their unimpeded  way.

Just The Facts, Ma'm

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution hastens to correct what appears to be a misleading report on children in poverty.

No, A Majority of US Public School Students are Not In Poverty  

In widely reported article the Washington Post says a Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty. The article cites the Southern Education Foundation:

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches.

Eligibility for free and reduced-price lunches, however, depends on eligibility rules and not just income levels let alone poverty rates.... Frankly I suspect that this study was intended to confuse the media by conflating “low-income” with “below the poverty line”. Indeed, why did this study grab headlines except for the greater than 50% statistic? It is very easy to find official numbers of the number of students in poverty according to the federal poverty standard....

If Mr. Tabarrok is correct and surely he is then we don't need to be nearly as concerned about the level of children in poverty as some deceptive people want us to be. Only one fifth of our children are in poverty, not over one half. So what's the hubbub, bub? Not only are there only 11 million children living in poverty, most of them aren't even, shall we say, of the right culture and therefore have nobody to blame but themselves, not that Mr. Tabarrok is blaming anybody.

In 2012, approximately 16.0 million, or 22 percent, of all children under the age of 18 were in families living in poverty; this population includes the 11.1 million 5- to 17-year-olds and 5.0 million children under age 5 living in poverty. The percentage of children under age 18 living in poverty varied across racial/ethnic groups. In 2012, the percentage was highest for Black children (39 percent), followed by American Indian/Alaska Native children (36 percent), Hispanic children (33 percent), Pacific Islander children (25 percent), and children of two or more races (22 percent). The poverty rate was lowest for White children (13 percent) and Asian children (14 percent).

Mr. Tabarrok is not insensitive to the plight of these children but is able to put it in perspective.

The number of school-age children living in poverty today is relatively high and not surprisingly did increase with the 2008 recession and its aftermath (green line in figure below – the numbers here differ slightly from NCES but the time line is longer). But recent numbers do not look like especially remarkable compared to the history.

He shows a chart that demonstrates child poverty fell from 27.3% in 1958 to 14.0% in 1968. Evidently the War on Poverty had an effect. By 2013 it was at 19.9%. The War on The Poor worked as well. But that is liberalspeak.

Mr. Tabarrok muses on and suggests the economy as a "possible reason," as another possibility he also notes the cultural aspect of one's lifestyle, for as we all know a poor mother should have gotten an education, found employment, married an appropriate and employed partner, and waited until comfortably placed to have children. Not that Mr. Tabarrok implies anything negative towards any member of any particular race. Indeed, he does not mention race at all.

It’s certainly worthwhile discussing why poverty has increased. The economy is one possible reason as are issues to do with family formation and marriage rates. Another possibility is immigration. A higher poverty rate caused by the immigration of more low-income children is compatible with everyone becoming better off over time and not necessarily a bad thing. Those are just a few possible topics worthy of investigation. I don’t claim that any of them are correct. I do claim, however, that we won’t get very far understanding the issue by shifting definitions and muddying the waters with misleading but attention grabbing statistics.

Mr. Tabarrok is right if he is right, although he does not claim he is right. The last thing we need is bad statistics. Poor immigrant children (Hispanic) might be poor as children but they will achieve in time. It is their way. It appears that marriage might be the key for lowering poverty in certain cultures, as Mr. Tarrabok has hinted, and a very worthy subject for investigation.

Heroes

A customer is being called a hero after pulling a gun on two armed robbery suspects at a Houston restaurant.... As the customer held one suspect for police, he fired as the other suspect ran off. The bullets shattered the front windows of the restaurant.

From Serenity:

Zoe: Do you know what the definition of a hero is? Someone who gets other people killed.

 At 8 pm there could have been people walking around outside the window. The armed customer was lucky.

If more people start shooting back, why wouldn't the robbers just walk in and shoot everyone? More guns, more ammo! An arms race! If citizens can't soldier up, only soldiers will have guns! I mean criminals!

Foodsplaining

Dear Lord, Megan McArdle is foodsplaining again. What edict is being issued forth from Mount McMegan mow?

It has come to my attention that some of you are becoming unable to eat good food unless it is spiced to within an inch of its life.

I have two words for her: Aleppo pepper.

I've been noticing this for a while. It started with friends who put hot sauce on everything, even on dishes that were perfectly good without hot sauce. With dinner party hosts who proudly declared that the secret to good cooking was just to douse something in Cajun spices until you noticed the powder forming drifts on the side of the pan. With people who reported that an Asian restaurant was "good" because it had left their taste buds numb for hours.

McBittman disapproves. Pepper is now Out and Something Else Yet To Be Disseminated is In.

Then, during the holiday season, I saw a Slate food writer declare that American apple pie is not as good as French apple pie because it is "bland and goopy," and I began to suspect that something had gone seriously wrong with our food culture. When I saw an article on restaurant chefs who are daring to bring back prime rib, I became sure of it.

The linked prime rib article demonstrates that prime rib never really went away, it just became too expensive to serve in many places. The real question a journalist should be asking is why a lucky few can now afford to pay high restaurant prices for expensive prime rib when so many others are buying meat on discount or not at all. Fortunately McArdle is a propagandist and can pretend the income inequality toggle in her SimReality  is on "off."

I'm as excited as anyone about the majestic spread of foreign food throughout our nation's urban downtowns, its strip malls and cookbook aisles, its fruited plains and amber waves of grain. I can't think of a national cuisine I don't like, and that includes foods that will sear the taste buds off a water buffalo's tongue at 20 feet.

McArdle knows all, experiences all, and approves all unless she doesn't which is probably your fault.

But somewhere along the way, too many people seem to have gotten the idea that if exotic foods are good, that must mean that the boring old domestic varieties are bad. Excuse me, "bland and goopy."
This is first-class fustian. If you are unable to enjoy simple, traditional fare that has been properly prepared with good ingredients, the problem is not with the food; it is with you. To purloin a phrase from Slate food writers, you're doing it wrong.

You may think conservatives food is boring and stuffy and bland and goopy but you are so very, very wrong, dear sir! T'is fustian to say so! (We now know McArdle reads Regency Romances, heh.)*

I'm not saying that you have to like every available food. I dislike tripe, most cooked fish, liver and kale. But that doesn't mean there's something wrong with foie gras or salmon mousse; it just means that I don't care for them. Almost anything I do like, however, is as good prepared simply as it is in your triple-braised habanero short rib stew. Complicated dishes highlight the interplay of ingredients, but basic recipes allow your ingredients to shine. And without all that capsaicin numbing your taste buds or salted caramel overwhelming your palate, you can taste their full, delicate flavor.

We just endured countless posts about seasoning your food to within an inch of its life but now simple, delicate flavors are the In Thing.

I am not above cutting the kernels off a fresh ear of corn, blanching them in a little boiling water, and then sauteing them in brown butter before drizzling with truffle oil. That is delicious. But fresh corn is also delicious boiled until just done, then eaten with butter and salt. Magnificent tomatoes make a magnificent marinara and an equally magnificent tomato sandwich on fresh bread with good ricotta and just a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Apples are gorgeous in a galette, and also in a good, old-fashioned American-style apple pie, with flaky pastry on top and lightly spiced juice oozing all over the plate. It is not a worse version of the French pastry; it is a different dish, to be enjoyed in its own right.

The guilty man flees when no one pursueth and the professional contrarian defends when no one condemns. One Slate writer calls apple pie some names and says it's too heavy and common for Thanksgiving, and McArdle must rush to make a quick and easy buck defend All-American Exceptionalist Conservative Pie.

To get the most out of eating, you should be prepared to like as many dishes as possible, including the old favorites that now seem a bit passe. You can broaden your horizons to enjoy the deliciously spicy foods of the Asian and African continents without looking down on the equally delicious culinary marvels that are right there at your feet. Prime rib, baked potatoes and, yes, pie have just as much place in our culinary canon as pad Thai. 

 

Likewise, it is good to eat three times a day, but not too much. You can eat hot food or cold food, but don't look down your nose on luke-warm food. This wonderfully original and necessary advice was 'splained to you by your elite so you now know what to do and how to do it. Say thank you to the nice lady, America.

*Yes I read some too. It turned out that most of them were genteel ladyporn novels.

The Return Of The McMonster

A world without the writings of Megan McArdle is a sunnier, happier place, even when it is cool and the rain is non-stop. For weeks I have basked in the warm glow of ignoring Megan McArdle but all good things must come to an end for McMegan is still hard at work, chipping away at anything and everything that might help someone not named Megan Jennifer McArdle Suderman.

Hazmat up. We're going in.

McMiser read that Obama wants to make community college free. This is a problem for her, since people other than McMincing would benefit. These people would be the poorest and most disadvantaged of people, which would make it worse. Those people are not supposed to succeed. They are supposed to stay in their little crime-ridden enclaves due to their lack of superior qualities.  They cannot be helped because of their culture, which tells them to expect others to help them, thereby depriving them of the motivation to help themselves. Of course the only way to succeed is to get married, put off having kids and get an education but McMe-me-me is not here to solve everyone's problems.

And really, isn't it just elitist to think that everyone has to go to college? Sure, everyone says that working hard, going to school and improving yourself is both the American Way and the Free Market Way but just because everyone says that everyone should do it doesn't mean that everyone can do it. Some people just aren't smart enough.

Why are we so obsessed with pushing that group further into the higher education system, rather than asking if we aren't putting too much emphasis on getting a degree?

Asking that question usually raises accusations of elitism, of dividing society into the worthy few and the many Morlocks who aren't good enough for college. I would argue instead that what's elitist is our current fixation on college.  It starts from the supposition that being good at school is some sort of great personal virtue, so that any suggestion that many people aren't good at school must mean that those people are not equal and valuable members of society. And that supposition is triple-distilled balderdash.

Isn't that special? It totally ignores reality but it sure sounds purty.

"Those" people often go to community college to become (well-paid) blue collar workers, developing skills and getting jobs in air condition repair and welding, for example. Many of these students, going by the community college I visited last year, are also new immigrants who manage to make it to America and want to improve themselves. McLady-of-the-Manor just adores having servants, doesn't she want them educated enough to serve her needs?

McMoron has many, many reasons why the poor can't be helped but she also has some handy imaginary solutions for her imaginary reality.

I have some ideas about what those policies might look like: broad deregulation, especially at the state and local level, to ease things for business creators and make it easier to get various sorts of jobs that are currently protected by licensing requirements; more co-op and apprenticeship programs; wage subsidies for entry-level workers, and perhaps a broad system of government internships that could help people gain experience outside of the classroom. I'm sure that there are many more I haven't named. But we won't find them as long as the only politically interesting solution is ever more years in school.

Naturally. End regulation and have the government pick up the tab for corporations' wages.