Nearer My God To Thee

Ross Douthat worries about your soul.

Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnamable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.

Nice words, even if they are borrowed from everyone else, but what do they mean?

Numinous (pronounced /ˈnjuːmɨnəs/, from the Classical Latin numen) is an English adjective describing the power or presence of a divinity. The word was popularised in the early twentieth century by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his influential book Das Heilige (1917; translated into English as The Idea of the Holy, 1923). According to Otto the numinous experience has two aspects: mysterium tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling; and mysterium fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. The numinous experience also has a personal quality to it, in that the person feels to be in communion with a wholly other. The numinous experience can lead in different cases to belief in deities, the supernatural, the sacred, the holy, and the transcendent.

[snip]

It may be viewed as "the intense feeling of unknowingly knowing that there is something which cannot be seen." This "knowing" can "befall" or overcome a person at any time and in any place — in a cathedral; next to a silent stream; on a lonely road; early in the morning or in the face of a beautiful sunset. Similarly, unpleasant or frightening scenes or experiences can lead to a sense of an unseen presence of ghosts, evil spirits or a general sense of the presence of evil. Visions or hallucinations of god, gods, the devil or devils can also happen.

I get it now. Numinous means schizophrenic. You are overcome with feelings that you are not alone, you are being watched by someone or something either all good and holy or or all unimaginably evil. Because you are filled with terror at the thought of evil supernatural creatures or ecstasy at the thought of an all-powerful creator or supernatural spirit, you are full of fear and trembling or rapture and trembling.

Why on earth would anyone yearn to be filled with imaginary fears? Why would the sight of beauty and wonders inevitably lead to a sudden belief in supernatural creatures and events? What motivates someone to make the leap from natural beauty to supernatural Hand Of God? What is Douthat looking for?

Our kind of [Earth-bouond] mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

Douthat doesn't like a religion that concentrates on the here-and-now, the human experience between fellow men and women. He wants a transformative experience that will change his entire world, as he is too weak to change it on his own.

Most religious believers will never be great mystics, of course, and the American way of faith is kinder than many earlier eras to those of us who won’t. But maybe it’s become too kind, and too accommodating. Even ordinary belief — the kind that seeks epiphanies between deadlines, and struggles even with the meager self-discipline required to get through Lent — depends on extraordinary examples, whether they’re embedded in our communities or cloistered in the great silence of a monastery.

Incredibly, with the ultimate example of Jesus's sacrifice constantly before him, Douthat can't find a reason to live by His example. The last sacrifice to end all sacrifices is not enough for him to feel God's presence. He needs more to summon up the fortitude to give up sandwiches for lunch or turn in his assignments to earn his generous paycheck. He needs-----transcendence!

Transcendence (religion), the concept of being entirely above the created universe.

Not for Master Ross Douthat is this too, too solid flesh. He must be above the entire world, like a balloon made of skin and filled with the gas of ecstasy, floating about everything, pure and unsoiled and untouched. But why? What drives Douthat to seek this magical, mystical state of existence?

Without them, faith can become just another form of worldliness, therapeutic rather than transcendent, and shorn of any claim to stand in judgment over our everyday choices and concerns.

Ah, we need transcendence to remind ourselves of sin and judgement. Speaking of Judgement Day, when we meet our Creator and are either admitted into God's Country Club or are rejected and tossed into God's Garbage Can, isn't Douthat forgetting something here? God still holds the whip hand, whether we transcend or not. He holds the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven and there is no way through except through Him. What does Douthat want, an engraved invitation?

Are we sure that Douthat is Christian? He seems to frequently forget major aspects of his own religion and its teachings. That must be why he needs transcendence; he has developed Godnesia, the forgetting of most of the basic tenets of one's own faith.

What's the point of this transcendence anyway?

Without them, too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

Douthat wants a new world order. He wants to be broken down, his personality shattered and discarded, and remade in a purer, more perfect form. And he wants to do it all while sitting in his New York apartment or suburban split-level, surrounded by wealth, safety and abundance. He doesn't give everything up and follow Jesus. He doesn't renounce wealth, power, privilege or position. Douthat chooses to work and live in the wealthiest, most elite circle possible, as far as possible from the modest lives of ordinary men and women. His own life is anything but shattered, and he deliberately made it as far removed from Jesus's humble life as humanly possible. Perhaps that is why he feels so alienated from his Father and Savior. It's not that The Common Man lives a life that is bourgeois and aimless. It's just that Ross Douthat has too much money to actually live up to his own standards.

Get thee to a nunnery, Ross Douthat! Renounce your riches and save your soul! Who knows, fear, hunger and pain might even make him hallucinate that he is communing with God, just like he wants.

Guest Post: Would Health Care Reform Help You?

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Barbara O'Brien of The Mahablog, guest-posting on the health care bill and mesothelioma.


Would Health Care Reform Help You?

Many obstacles and stumbling blocks remain in the way of health care reform. The House and Senate bills will have to be merged, and then the House and Senate both will vote on the final bill. We don’t yet know what will be in the final bill, or if the final bill will be passed into law. Passage will be especially difficult in the Senate, where it will need 60 votes to pass. It is still possible that after all this angst, just one grandstanding senator could kill the whole thing.

But just for fun, let’s look at what conventional wisdom says will be in the final bill and see if there is anything in it that will be an immediate benefit to people with peritoneal mesothelioma and other asbestos-related disease.

It is likely that the final bill will provide additional funding for state high-risk insurance pools. Currently more than 30 states run such pools, which are nonprofit, state-sponsored health insurance plans for people who can’t buy insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The biggest problem with such pools is that, often, the insurance they offer is too expensive for many who might need it. Both the Senate and House bills provide $5 billion in subsidies for state high-risk pools to make the insurance more affordable.

Under the Senate bill, beginning in 2014, private companies would no longer be able to deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions, nor could they charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Until then, the state high-risk pools could provide some help.

Closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap — also called the “doughnut hole” — is another potential provision that could help some patients with asbestos-related disease. The “doughnut hole” is the gap between the coverage for yearly out-of-pocket expenses provided by Medicare Part D and Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage” threshold.

For example, in 2009 Medicare Part D paid at least 75 percent of what patients paid for prescription drugs up to $2,700. After that, patients must pay for all of their prescription medications until what they have paid exceeds $6,154. At that point, the catastrophic coverage takes over, and Medicare pays for all but 5 percent of the patient’s drug bills. The final health care reform bill probably will provide for paying at least 50 percent of out-of-pocket costs in the doughnut hole.

You may have heard the bills include budget cuts to the Medicare program, and this has been a big concern to many people. Proponents of the bill insist that savings can be found to pay for the cuts, and that people who depend on Medicare won’t face reduced services. But this is a complex issue that I want to address in a later post.

The long-term provisions probably will include many other provisions that would benefit patients with asbestos-related disease, including increased funding for medical research. Although there are many complaints about the bill coming from all parts of the political spectrum, on the whole it would be a huge benefit to many people.

— Barbara O’Brien

March 4, 2010

Dullsville

The new format for The Atlantic has tamed and subdued our Megan McArdle, demoting her to just another face and voice. Gone are the ludicrous, nonsensical claims and petty, mean-girl attacks on liberals, leaving behind only middle-of-the-road mush that manages to say nothing. Sure, she still gets her facts wrong, but the thrill of discovering rampant stupidity is gone. We will cover her more bizarre goings-on, but there's no point in reporting that McArdle said students don't want to pay more for their education although the universities are hurting for money.

On The Death Of Jon Swift

My first reaction to reading Jon Swift was a deep, burning envy. He did what I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it. The light touch of sarcasm, made weighty by the genuine anger and indignation behind it. The delicacy of the evisceration of his targets, like sliding in a knife which is almost unnoticed until it is all the way in--and then twisted. The deadpan humor. It was a thing of beauty, and I admired his writing just as much as I envied it.

We write because we must, because we love words, need to express our thoughts, and have this wonderful opportunity to do it on the internet, where there is a faint hope of finding an audience willing to read what we say. We love it so much we do it for free, taking valuable time that is needed for work and family. And we hope, despite all the odds, that we are appreciated and liked as much as we appreciate and like all the writers we read every day.

Blogging showed us that we live in a world of full of interesting, funny, learned, giving people, each utterly unique but still, somehow, all connected to each other through a desire to share and learn. People I never met taught me how to argue, reason, and empathize. And in return I hope I made them laugh or think. It's a small gift but it's the only one I have and I gladly give it to the world, because the world has given me so much in return. We crave acceptance, praise and recognition from others, but we are happiest when we are giving and sharing of ourselves, because it is then that we become as one, a Blogtopia of fools, villains and heroes, uniting to say goodnight to a valued and respected fellow citizen.

McBoring

What the hell?

[Commenter]

You have inadequate imagination of the complex prescription regimes some people must follow. Not all prescriptions are pills, for example. I take one or more prescription medications at 6 separate times of the day, at different time intervals.

McMegan 13 hours ago in reply to [commenter]

I take pills in the morning, different pills at night, and inhalers on a different schedule . . . does that count?

Megan McArdle is calling herself McMegan? If she wants a nickname, I can think of better ones. Like Corporate Shill. Lakey Of The Ruling Elite. Future Unemployed Journalist With No Money And A Preexisting Condition. If she didn't notice "McMegan" is a negative term, maybe she won't notice that mine are as well.

The post is a meandering bit about pills, pill boxes, and pill-taking habits. McArdle seems to be retreating to a lucrative but boring world of random sniping at the government with platitudes and petty complaints. It's as dull as dirt but it does demonstrate early adaptive techniques. McArdle is helping to create a brave new world of educated tea baggers, who are able to provide intellectual arguments for selfishness, venality, greed and spite. She is Glen Glenda Beck, with a blog instead of a whiteboard. She is Jonah Goldberg in a Boden frock. She's worse than annoying--she's boring.

UPDATE: News Alert! Our correspondent reports Democrats think they'll pass health care and Republicans think they won't! She recommends that we wait and see to find out what will happen.

Short Sighted

Lack of sleep is eating away at Megan McArdle, and she is bitter and down-spirited. Nothing can be done about unemployment because the government is incompetent, and the post office system should be allowed to die because it unfairly undercuts UPS and McArdle doesn't need it anyway. Pointing out counter-arguments would be futile, as McArdle is being paid to rail against government interference in the holy sphere of private enterprise.

We are out of time, out of money, and out of luck. Nobody knows what the future will hold for us but we do know that mortgages and loans will continue to fail, banks and businesses will go under, and deflation will be followed by inflation. Watching McArdle snipe at the government from her comfortable perch in the government's lap is like watching a bird peck its owner to death. Sure, you got rid of that annoying old biddie, but who's going to feed you now that she's gone?

Alms For The Poor

Megan McArdle posts unusually early to burnish her somewhat tarnished Wise Observer From Above credentials. Today she is being Fair And Balanced about unemployment benefits, and recommends their extension, despite libertarians' hatred of government charity and conservatives' distaste for the poor. But these are special circumstances; the US has been victimized by the Asian savings glut and minority home ownership. The biggest banks accidentally got much bigger, and just happened to siphon off billions of middle-class dollars from unregulated financial activity. And now people are starting to go hungry, a potentially devastating situation for thousands of politicians. Extending employment benefits is not the right thing to do, but it must be done.

The United States has basically the right idea about unemployment benefits. Giving people unemployment assistance has a negative effect on work: the easier it is to stay out of the workforce, the more people will do it. Not only does this up the cost to the public fisc; it also destroys human capital, as skills stagnate. This is a lot of the reason that Europe has historically had high unemployment compared to the US (though there are other issues, and the insurance system is much worse in some countries than others.)

McArdle believes what she is told, the good little authoritarian that she is, and she believes that people act rationally because she was told people act rationally.

The basic idea of rational choice theory is that patterns of behavior in societies reflect the choices made by individuals as they try to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs. In other words, people make decisions about how they should act by comparing the costs and benefits of different courses of action. As a result, patterns of behavior will develop within the society that result from those choices.

The idea of rational choice, where people compare the costs and benefits of certain actions, is easy to see in economic theory. Since people want to get the most useful products at the lowest price, they will judge the benefits of a certain object (for example, how useful is it or how attractive is it) compared to similar objects. Then they will compare prices (or costs). In general, people will choose the object that provides the greatest reward at the lowest cost.

How does this translate after it filters through McArdle's porous head?

Giving people unemployment assistance has a negative effect on work: the easier it is to stay out of the workforce, the more people will do it.

Amazingly, McArdle does not cast her thoughts back to her own experiences, which have always been such a providential source of insight for her. McArdle was miserable when she was unemployed. She had to move in with her parents, watched all her money go to medical expenses, and felt alienated from her free-spending employed friends. When she couldn't find a job in the financial sector, she took a low-paying but dignified and perk-laden job as a writer. But McArdle's unemployment was the elite kind, where the situation is quite clearly temporary and not at all the fault of the unemployed person.

The other classes who make up this kind of employment are more shiftless, and will not work if they can get the generous monthly check from Uncle Sam instead. In Texas that would be between $58 and $392, depending on how much you were earning while employed. Under McArdle's theory, a low-wage earner would weigh having a job against raking in that big $100 a month and choose the money instead. Therefore unemployment benefits are bad.

Fortunately, however, we are in a recession, and we can put aside our scruples and help the poor, just like McArdle was able to put aside her scruples to accept health care from her employer.

The New And Improved Atlantic!

Obviously, the changes to The Atlantic were made to increase the number of hits, since we are forced to increase the number of hits we make to read McArdle's work. This is very, very interesting. Why is The Atlantic, which has never made money, trying to make more money? In 2008, the president of Atlantic Media was quoted: "The magazine is still in the red, in the $3-to-$5-million range, but he hopes to be in the black in five years." Is it necessary, or is David G. Bradley just trying to maximize the relatively small revenue that comes from the on-line magazine?

The new format is also filled with bugs.

Meanwhile, most of the more sane members of the comment section seem to have given up, leaving it to the rabid libertarians, who attack and gnaw at the few remaining less rabid libertarians like jackals at a corpse.

Also meanwhile, nearly two weeks after McArdle published "Myth Diagnosis," she has yet to directly answer her critics. McArdle's posts supporting her stupidity (Nine! Count 'em! Nine! Lovely supporting posts!) mostly restate her stupidity rather than backing it up with facts.

Stupidity the First: Make Up Shit

So while it's entirely possible--indeed certain--that some number of people are saved by having insurance, it's also very likely that some number of people are saved by not having it, or having less generous insurance, because they don't go in for a treatment that would have killed them.

The 2009 paper was looking at a small subset of conditions that are urgent, and which we're relatively adept at treating. But it may be washed out by the people who die having knee surgery.

Stupidity the Second: Nobody Knows Anything, Ever

I thought I'd made it clear, but apparently not: I think it is possible that the lack of insurance has no effect on aggregate mortality statistics. I do not think that this is likely, but I think it's possible. What I think is likely is that the effect is not that large, because if it were large, it would be very surprising to see so little effect on the mortality of an elderly population with a high mortality rate, or to have a study that samples 600,000 people and finds no effect.

Mostly what I think is that the statistics are really, really flawed. Not because the authors are bad social scientists, but because this stuff is so hard to tease out. Natural experiments are rare, and data sets often hard to come by.

Stupidity the Third: Science Stuff Is Too Hard To Figure Out

What I said is, the studies so far done often cannot exclude the possibility that there is no effect--this is true of one of the two studies that IOM/Urban relied upon, and also of the largest observational study done to date, which found no effect. That is not the same as saying there is no effect. Health data, like economic data, is very noisy. Sometimes effects that we're pretty sure exist just can't be easily teased out of the data . . . like, oh, I dunno, the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus, say.

What I am saying is that we don't know how big the effect is. Refuting me involves, not saying that well, here's another study showing some effect, but rather, taking a stand and saying we do know how big the effect is, or at minimum, that we can prove it's probably at least 20,000 people a year, the figure I was discussing.

McArdle promised to answer her critics within a few days, but that was about a week ago, so it must have slipped her wedding-occupied mind.

ADDED: More information from a post discussing the bugs in the new system:

This blog may never be exactly what you want. Let's be honest: I work for a commercial organization, and in order for them to continue to pay my paycheck, this site needs to be profitable. So we're going to have ads and other features that may well annoy you from time to time.

It's going to have to be a lot more profitable to make up a $3-5 million shortfall.

Yippie!

Megan McArdle is undergoing renovation, so we are taking the day off. I hope someone does something about the lack of post foundation and overall poor structural integrity.

Shiny Objects

Megan heard that some little girls don't have any dolls. Fuck 'em.


Megan McArdle tweets:

I'm against gold buggery, but the commercials on FoxBusiness do make me want to have some pretty gold coins I can trickle through my fingers
about 11 hours ago via TweetDeck

@aphofer oops, let's say gold buggishness.
about 10 hours ago via TweetDeck

Lord, Hear My Prayer

Kathryn Jean Lopez twitters:

catholics and mormons together? http://ncronline.org/news/faith-parish/catholics-mormons-defend-religious-freedom-together
about 1 hours ago via web

Ordinarily I'd say, "Sorry, honey, he's married," but who knows? Maybe there's hope for her after all.

An Economic Guru Shares Her Wisdom

Megan McArdle discusses the thoughts of Ann Althouse. I think that actions speaks for itself.

Megan McArdle speculates that that inactivity leads to weight gain. If Obama had recommended exercise McArdle would now be churning out a dozen paragraphs saying that while one might surmise intuitively that exercise leads to weight loss, one would be wrong because of revealed preference, and the literature is just too noisy to draw any hasty conclusions.

A New Low

I scarcely know what to say about McArdle's latest, except that is a very typical of McArdle's ignorant pronunciations on things she knows nothing about, but imagines she understands because the subject matter tangentially and momentarily intersected with her life. McArdle discusses pedophilia and expresses sympathy for the "innate" urge and says we should gather around and praise the non-practicing pedophiles. I will not quote the post.

She understands nothing and says anything. She should be fired for this embarrassment, but she should have been fired for all the other embarrassments too.

Paging Dr. McArdle, Stat!

Today we shall be brief. Dr. Megan McArdle explains the medical industry to us.

That's how cancer treatment has mostly advanced--not with a spectacular cure that can be funded by better targeted NIH money, or identified by comparative effectiveness research. It grinds out small improvements one at a time, experimenting with combinations of drugs and radiation and surgery, dosages, and timing. A lot of the improvement in mortality rates comes from better detection--but that means a lot of money wasted on tests, and biopsies for false positives.

Will the drug be "worth it"? What's the price of giving someone six months instead of one to say good bye to their family, or shrinking their tumors so that they don't die in pain? Technocrats can't answer those questions. We have to.

Therefore, we can't have national health care like everyone else. And the NIH Stem Cell Unit doesn't exist. And a new treatment for cancer using stem cells has not been developed.

I have an idea--instead of looking for a teaching job this spring, I will find someone to give me a lot of money to make up wrong information about subjects I do not understand and will not google, let alone research. My first article will be on prostitution so I will find a pimp to tell me all about his profession. I will pass on his word as gospel, and recommend to my readers that the buying and selling of women should be allowed. Otherwise millions will die, the markets for feather boas and wide-brimmed hats will crash, and Milton Friedman will cry one bitter tear.

The Princess Bride, Part II

Today, Megan McArdle discusses the most fascinating subject in the world, Megan McArdle. You may have heard her mention once or twice that she is affianced to boy tea bagger P. Suderman, ret. McArdle spent the weekend buying her wedding ring and happily announced it to the world, but one small speck, one tiny blight, marred her Perfect Day.

Via McArdle's link to her boyfriend's present and cross-your-fingers-and-hope-to-die-future employer, we learn that some jewelers are eager to open a new market and increase revenue, the God-given right and duty of every free market entrepreneur. This should warm the cockles of McArdle's heart, but as we already know, if the gays get their hands on marriage, they'll just ruin it for everyone else.

It seems to me that there is a market opening for the brave young entrepreneur who is ready to redefine the gendered engagement ring for the gay community. But I'm a little puzzled about the idea of gay wedding rings. We bought ours yesterday, and though there was a big difference between men's and women's rings, I can't say that any of the rings in either gender screamed "gay" or "straight". The form factor for a circular band seems to have been pretty well settled, and I'm just not sure there's a lot of room there to express your sexual preference.

What puzzles our princess bride? Marketing? Niche marketing? Niche marketing for a new market? If a product is "pretty well settled" in form, should the form never change? Or should it not change just for gay couples?

Oddly enough, not everyone suffers from McArdle's lack of imagination and entrepreneurial spirit. If you Google "gay wedding and engagement rings," you get a wealth of information and merchandise available for the happy gay couple.* McArdle once again depends on her gut to tell her what other people want, and lo, her gut just happens to say that almost everyone wants the exact same things that McArdle and her friends want.

Ah, but that's not the good part. Let's take a look at the comments. We will paraphrase the commenters for brevity and directly quote McArdle.

Commenter: It's marketing.

McArdle: "Mmmm . . . but it's not like gay men are going to want to wear bigger womens' rings, and studding men's wedding rings with diamonds is more of a class thing than a sexual preference issue."

Commenter: Rings can't be designed for gay men?

McArdle: "I was in Act-Up, so yes, I'm familiar with triangles! But a very small minority of my friends from those days, gay or straight, have wished to incorporate those kinds of symbols into their wedding bands, and believe it or not, there are wedding bands with triangles already on them, for gay or straight people who like triangles."

So wedding rings are already designed for gay men, but there is no market for wedding rings designed for gay men. And if a friend of McArdle does not want them, nobody wants them.

Commenter: Small markets aren't served?

McArdle: "I'm saying that top of the line jewelers don't usually introduce "their new line of [celtic . . . asian . . . african-american . . . etc] rings, because only a small minority of any given population wants to make their group identity a major statement on their wedding rings. Yes, you can buy wedding rings emblazoned with any group symbol you'd care to name, but the problem is, then they don't look so much like wedding rings, and only a tiny percentage of the group in question usually buys them.

I'm not against it--I'm very pleased that they're trying to cash in on gay marriage, insofar as it recognizes that gay marriage is a coming trend. But like most attempts to cash in on trends, it seems a little dumb, too.

If y'all weren't totally convinced that everything I say is some sort of coded attempt to advance a right-wing agenda, you wouldn't need to work yourself into a lather every twenty minutes."

You see, gay marriage is just the trend of the moment, and cashing in on it will be dumb. But there will not be a market for specialized designs, despite the fact that there already is a market for specialized designs, because they don't look like traditional wedding rings. And we all know that the question of what a wedding should look like is "pretty well settled."

Commenter: So it's a class issue?

McArdle: "As for class issues . . . um, yes? I'm not under the impression that class doesn't exist, or that it's somehow bad taste to talk about it.

But then, we bought our wedding bands at Zales."

Commenter: What about Celtic rings?

McArdle: "I have seen them . . . but none of the Irish Americans I know even considered one. It's a very niche market, and weirdly, a lot of its customers don't have much connection, genetic or otherwise, to Ireland."

Well, if none of the people that McArdle knows buy Claddagh rings or rings with the Celtic knot, that means nobody does. Someone should tell all those people selling Irish rings that they're wasting their time.

Commenters: Megan doesn't know what gays want. Megan is being elitist.

McArdle: "Yes, Rob, because unless you're a liberal, you don't know any gay people! What a reasonable, informed conclusion to draw.

I'm not going to start iwth the "some of my best friends are gay" act, because that's ridiculous. Let's just say, I know a lot of people who want to marry folks of the same gender, and finding wedding rings that work is not one of the issues we've discussed. Engagement rings, now, are a big issue.

Calling this elite is even more moronic, Ginger . . . "not knowing any gay people" hasn't been a characteristic of the elite . . .well, ever, but for not knowing any "openly gay people" it's been a few decades at least."

Commenter: What? Also, your spelling is bad.

McArdle: "I do appreciate your corrections of my many spelling errors, but I do wish you would practice Reading Comprehension 101. On a side note, all you're contributing to the blog these days is hatred of me. If your target were anyone else, I'd already have banned you. Please try to get the "You suck!":discussion ration down to, say, 1:4, or I still may."

Commenter: You bought your ring at Zales?

As of this time McArdle has no responded to the comment on her choice of jewelry stores. Of course there is nothing whatsoever wrong with shopping at Zales, but it does do some damage to McArdle's elitist creds. It's kind of hard to argue from elitism when you buy your wedding ring next door to Hot Topic and an Orange Julius hut.

UPDATE: McArdle says that she bought her wedding bands (not her engagement ring) at Zales due to time limits.

*I also found out by googling that Hitler sent women who used contraception to death camps. They had to wear a black triangle, the same as lesbians and prostitutes.

Why We Fight

This is why we kill. Andrew Sullivan:

In my faith, God appears before us all the time and yet we do not see God's presence. But sometimes it is so over-powering even we cannot look away. This often happens in moments of great suffering and pain, in my experience, as if the veil we place over our eyes to protect ourselves from God's overwhelming love is somehow lifted paradoxically by suffering. I have never felt closer to God than during some of the worst moments of my life.

In suffering the attack on New York, some people were filled with the euphoria of oneness, the elusive and almost orgasmic thrill of being utterly absorbed by the group, no longer alone in fear and pain. For one moment the fear was repelled by strength of numbers, the alienation and loneliness replaced with perfect acceptance and unity, and the sense of relentless exploitation by our consumer society replaced with a sense of righteous common purpose. Then the burden of daily reality came flooding back, leaving the people even more afraid than before. They yearned with every fiber of their being to regain that orgasmic euphoria, and so we began the bombing and invasions.

This yearning for transcendence, through god worship or war or sex or heaven-knows-what is irrational and deadly. If you want to feel good about yourself, stop telling yourself that you're a sinner in the hands of an angry god. Stop looking to others for acceptance and a sense of purpose and look within. Accept who you are, like who you are, and do good to feel good.

Tsk-Tsk

Kathryn Jean Lopez bemoans our celebrity culture.

I can't really imagine what tiger woods has to tell the world tomorrow.
about 15 hours ago from UberTwitter

It's all so distasteful.

i really feel like i don't need to be watching this woods press conference.
about 2 hours ago from web

Liberal culture is so decadent. Conservatives prefer wholesome entertainment.

"Please leave my wife and kids alone." Without taking responsibility off himself, media becomes a shameful enemy too. http://myloc.me/3XtgW
about 2 hours ago from UberTwitter

The media should be ashamed for avidly following this immoral farce.

Court Jester

Shorter David Brooks: Everything was so much better when we had an aristocracy.

It must be tough to be a royal ass-kisser when there are no more royal asses to kiss. Brooks puckers up and does his best, but the asses keep changing on him.

Megan McArdle: B.A., MBA, F.U.

Shorter Megan McArdle: Since I have special influence, plenty of money, and employer-and-government subsidized health insurance, other people do not need health care reform.

St. Milton of Friedman Elementary

By scrapping the existing school system, conservatives can get rid of a powerful and influential Democratic union, gain a new source of revenue and a valuable consumer demographic, eliminate taxes, and ensure a permanent underclass of underpaid workers. The only wonder is that the public schools were allowed to exist at all.

Megan McArdle is pushing school voucher programs again, an utterly inexplicable action on the part of a "libertarian." Libertarians want all public schools abolished, as well as taxes and state control. The last thing they should want is public money being redistributed to help pay for someone else's education. But once you ignore that little complication, you are free to indulge in glowing fantasies of complete privatization, with businesses taking over schools and the government getting out of education. Still, privatization doesn't put cash in McArdle's pocket; vouchers would.

There's a small problems with this free market solution--it has all of the problems of the free market as well. Businesses want control over supply, freedom from regulation, ability to compete. They are cost-effective, stream-lined, out-sourced, and leveraged. Over here in the real world, privatization would deny poor children many services and risk even greater social and financial inequality. Fortunately for voucher proponents, not everyone lives in the real world. What does Our Lady Of The Atlantic Lake, Megan McArdle, think about this issue?

McArdle quotes Mathew Yglesias, who discusses a recent study on school vouchers:

Friedman (1962) argued that a free market in which schools compete based upon their reputation would lead to an efficient supply of educational services. This paper explores this issue by building a tractable model in which rational individuals go to school and accumulate skill valued in a perfectly competitive labor market. To this it adds one ingredient: school reputation in the spirit of Holmstrom (1982). The first result is that if schools cannot select students based upon their ability, then a free market is indeed efficient and encourages entry by high productivity schools. However, if schools are allowed to select on ability, then competition leads to stratification by parental income, increased transmission of income inequality, and reduced student effort--in some cases lowering the accumulation of skill. The model accounts for several (sometimes puzzling) findings in the educational literature, and implies that national standardized testing can play a key role in enhancing learning.

Friedman had no problem with children being left behind. He seemed to assume that it would happen, and in fact wanted only to provide the most minimum free education possible.

Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on "approved" educational services. Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum on purchasing educational services from an "approved" institution of their own choice. The educational services could be rendered by private enterprises operated for profit, or by non-profit institutions of various kinds. The role of the government would be limited to assuring that the schools met certain minimum standards such as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to assure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards.

He had no problem with inequality, since it was a by-product of perfect individual freedom.

Essentially this proposal--public financing but private operation of education-- has recently been suggested in several southern states as a means of evading the Supreme Court ruling against segregation. This fact came to my attention after this paper was essentially in its present form. My initial reaction--and I venture to predict, that of most readers--was that this possible use of the proposal was a count against it, that it was a particularly striking case of the possible defect--the exacerbating of class distinctions--referred to in the second paragraph preceding the one to which this note is attached.

Further thought has led me to reverse my initial reaction. Principles can be tested most clearly by extreme cases. Willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one agrees is hardly evidence of devotion to the principle of free speech; the relevant test is willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one thoroughly disagrees. Similarly, the relevant test of the belief in individual freedom is the willingness to oppose state intervention even when it is designed to prevent individual activity of a kind one thoroughly dislikes. I deplore segregation and racial prejudice; pursuant to the principles set forth at the outset of the paper, it is clearly an appropriate function of the state to prevent the use of violence and physical coercion by one group on another; equally clearly, it is not an appropriate function of the state to try to force individuals to act in accordance with my--or anyone else's--views, whether about racial prejudice or the party to vote for, so long as the action of any one individual affects mostly himself. These are the grounds on which I oppose the proposed Fair Employment Practices Commissions; and they lead me equally to oppose forced nonsegregation.

However, the same grounds also lead me to oppose forced segregation. Yet, so long as the schools are publicly operated, the only choice is between forced nonsegregation and forced segregation; and if I must choose between these evils, I would choose the former as the lesser. The fact that I must make this choice is a reflection of the basic weakness of a publicly operated school system. Privately conducted schools can resolve the dilemma. They make unnecessary either choice. Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to. The appropriate activity for those who oppose segregation and racial prejudice is to try to persuade others of their views; if and as they succeed, the mixed schools will grow at the expense of the nonmixed, and a gradual transition will take place. So long as the school system is publicly operated, only drastic change is possible; one must go from one extreme to the other; it is a great virtue of the private arrangement that it permits a gradual transition.

An example that comes to mind as illustrating the preceding argument is summer camps for children. Is there any objection to the simultaneous existence of some camps that are wholly Jewish, some wholly non-Jewish, and some mixed? One can--though many who would react quite differently to negro-white segregation would not--deplore the existence of attitudes that lead to the three types: one can seek to propagate views that would tend to the growth of the mixed school at the expense of the extremes; but is it an appropriate function of the state to prohibit the unmixed camps?

The establishment of private schools does not of itself guarantee the desirable freedom of choice on the part of parents. The public funds could be made available subject to the condition that parents use them solely in segregated schools; and it may be that some such condition is contained in the proposals now under consideration by southern states. Similarly, the public funds could be made available for use solely in nonsegregated schools. The proposed plan is not therefore inconsistent with forced segregation or forced nonsegregation. The point is that it makes available a third alternative.

Charming man.

McArdle responds to Yglesias's post:

There is more to a market than buying or selling. Armchair economists and parlor libertarians often act as if all you need to make a market is to remove the government barriers to trade. This can be true (ag subsidies, I'm looking at you!), but in many places it's nowhere near enough. You need the social norms that support market trade, and you need to set good rules by which trade happens. What we did to Russia is a good example of why the "get government out of the way" theory is not sufficient.

[the quote]

The rules surrounding markets matter a lot--and the reason we don't know this is that the rules that work have disappeared into the background, faded out of our consciousness, become part of the miasma of "the market". For example, I recall a web debate years ago in which someone made the standard point that cartels are very difficult to hold together, which means anti-trust rules about this sort of thing have dubious utility. I believe it was Eugene Volokh who pointed out that this was true . . . but only because courts refused to enforce cartel agreements. If courts did enforce them, cartels would work pretty well--which is why we still have professional sports leagues.

Luckily, this is the sort of rule that most voucher programs enforce--and because I find this paper pretty convincing, I'd say they should continue to.

The crux of the entire argument is whether or not most voucher programs enforce open enrollment, and McArdle gives us no proof at all of her statement. The DC voucher program gave out "scholarships" through a lottery system, and the kids could go to any private school that would admit them. Most of them went to Catholic schools. We have no evidence that admittance to the schools was equal, only that distribution of the vouchers was equal.

Friedman did not consider inequality to be a problem. He addressed the problem of class distinctions, losing the "healthy intermingling of children from decidedly different backgrounds," but dismissed it, saying that most children don't mix with other backgrounds under the present system due to residential stratification. "The establishment of private schools does not of itself guarantee the desirable freedom of choice on the part of parents," Friedman said, and there is no guarantee that a school will admit anyone who wants admittance, and won't retain the rights of refusal of service.

I was not able to find any regulations stating that DC Catholic schools were required to take children of other religions, children with expensive special needs that require additional personnel, services and equipment, mentally disturbed, disruptive students, or children with limited intellectual ability. (Federal law requires that public school districts identify private school students with special needs and provide them with equitable services, further subsidizing private schools.) They may be there, but I could not find them and evidently neither could McArdle, who presents her opinion as fact. Many, many private schools compete on the basis of high standards and accelerated learning, where intelligent children will not be held back by others of lower ability who need more time and help. These schools will not suddenly throw away their successful business plan. Schools with high scores and student achievement will be able to charge higher tuition and provide more services. More modest schools will not. Most of all, the amount of the voucher will dictate growing inequality. The poor will lose thousands in services every year.

Average per pupil costs of the public schools in Washington [DC] was $8,812 in 1995-96, thelast year for which reliable information is available.28However, this figure includes monies forancillary costs, such as transportation, school lunch, capital costs and central administration, costsnot incurred by all private schools. When public-school expenditures for services and programscomparable to those offered in private schools are considered, estimated average public-schoolper-pupil expenditure was $7,653 in 1995-96. Presumably, per pupil expenditure was higher in1998-99. But if public-school expenditure remained constant after 1996, the amount spent perpupil was an estimated 92 percent higher than those in the private schools attended by the averagescholarship student.

Given these differences in expenditure levels, one would expect to find more extensivefacilities and smaller classes in Washington public schools. But reports from parents are onlypartially consistent with this expectation. Smaller classes require more teachers relative to thenumber of pupils, and the number of teachers in a school is a significant determinant of schoolcosts. It is, therefore, surprising that public schools were said to have larger classes. Parents saidpublic schools, on average, had 22 students in their classrooms, four more than those in privateschools (Table 5).

In focus group sessions, Washington parents often expressed concern about the lack ofresources in both public and private schools. In one focus group consisting mainly of public-school parents, the conversation ran as follows:28 Data taken from the U. S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement. NationalCenter for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, School Years 1993-94 through 1997-98. (Washington, D. C.:2000). Comparable data estimate excludes public-school expenditure for student transportation, food services,enterprise operations, non-elementary/secondary programs, adult education, capital outlay, payments to other schoolsystems, payments to state governments, interest on school system debt, central support for planning research andmanagement services, and unspecified support services.

25Mother: I mean my kids have come home and told me they don't even have toiletpaper....That's ridiculous.2ndmother: Oh, yeah, and they can't drink the water. They had to take a case of water toschool.3rdmother: My son took two cases of water to school because some of the kids can'treally afford to bring them. They have to sit there all day without water.4thmother: One day this week, ... the coldest day in school, --- didn't have any heat. Thekids had sit in the classroom with coats on. 29

Still, findings from the parental survey displayed in Table 5 suggest that the number of facilitiesand programs were more extensive in public schools than in private schools of the District ofColumbia. Parents of students in public schools were much more likely to report that their schoolhad a nurse's office. They were also considerably more likely to say the school had a cafeteriaand special programs for non-English speakers—for each of these items, the differences werelarge, nearly 25 percentage points or more. Public-school parents were also somewhat morelikely to say their school had a special education program, library and a computer lab. On theother hand, private-school parents were more likely to report that their school had individualtutors, a difference of 19 percentage points. Moreover, they were somewhat more likely toindicate that the school had an after-school program and a program for advanced learners. Therewere no significant differences in the parent responses with respect to the following facilities andprograms: child counselors, arts and music programs, and a gymnasium.

But remember--opponents of vouchers are morally bankrupt.

Forgive me--I'm about to get testy again--but this thread on 11D really does seem to me to showcase in stunning technocolor the moral bankruptcy of voucher opponents who have pulled their own kids out of failing inner city schools. They have no good answer for why their choice is morally worthy, but vouchers are horrifying; their response to the deep need of kids in failing schools is a slightly gussied up version of "screw you, I've got mine." Their children's future, you see, is an infinitely precious resource that trumps their principles of distributional justice and community solidarity, but they cannot imagine putting the futures of poorer, darker skinned children ahead of sacred principles such as "Thou shalt not allow children to attend schools run by the Catholic Church" and "Supporting the public schools (even when they suck)". I could do a better job arguing against school vouchers.

Savvy fake libertarians understand that most voucher money will probably go to people already in private school, and Megan McArdle, whose parents paid a large fortune for her private school education, doesn't seem to mind redistribution if some of it comes her way. After all, some day there will be a Little Megan, God willing, and why should McArdle pay all of her private school tuition when she can con all the Heartland mommies and daddies into helping pay for it instead? Right now we're taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, when with the voucher system we can take money from the poor and give it to the rich!