Category: Current Events

I stumbled on this on the Washington Post site the other day. It’s a supposedly “terrifying chart” that shows “we’re not growing enough food to feed the world”:

Crop yields have been rising for decades, but at their current paces (solid lines) they won’t be nearly enough to meet projected demand (dotted lines). Ergo, terrifying.

I don’t know, maybe I have too much faith in the power of markets and innovation and not enough faith in the “running out of food” movement that’s been wrong for at least six decades, but I’m not feeling too scared here.

The climate change food crisis I looked for a year ago still shows no signs of arriving; world total cereal production is looking to set another record this year. From 1990 to 2010, world population ballooned from 5 billion to 7 billion, yet the number of people living in absolute poverty – a.k.a. probably not getting enough food to eat – dropped from 1.9 billion to 1.2 billion. If we weren’t “growing enough food to feed the world” right now, at least, corn prices wouldn’t be tumbling to an almost 3-year low. (It’s almost like people planted more corn because price signals work or something.)

But what about that future? I see a world whose food production has kept up almost perfectly with demand so far and no reason to doubt it can continue, “physiological limits” of plants notwithstanding. As developing countries get richer, they eat more – but they also get more productive at producing food themselves. It’s even more impressive to consider that we are feeding more and more of the world while using less land to do it; US farms are producing record yields these days even while using 20% fewer acres than they did 60 years ago.

Even if we do start reaching biological limits for increasing yields, there is still plenty of space for growing more food – even just in the US. If prices get high enough, there are millions of lawns and rooftops waiting for innovative farming methods. And have you ever heard of aquaponics? OK, but what about all the meat that increasingly rich populations want to eat? Well, if we can’t breed enough animals in healthy enough environments, prices will make us change our minds. Who knows, maybe that fake meat thing will take off.

There are all sorts of ways incentives will cause people to adapt to keep coming up with ways to keep feeding ourselves, most of which I probably haven’t even imagined. I’m not saying it won’t be hard. But it’s certainly not terrifying.

I said earlier that I thought millions of people were not qualified to be upset about The Verdict. I still believe that, but I’ve been talking with a liberal friend to try to better understand them instead of automatically writing them all off. Megan McArdle noted that the left and right have reversed criminal justice stances in this case – usually it’s the right that’s all about punishment and justice and deterrence, and the left that doesn’t want harsh jail time because it’s not very rehabilitative or whatever. So what’s going on to make the left so upset that George was acquitted?

Well, it’s important to remember that this happened in the context of blacks being treated unfairly in our criminal justice system. Blacks get arrested for marijuana at much higher rates than whites. There’s the 100 to 1 disparity between sentencing for crack (apparently more likely to be used by blacks) and powder cocaine (apparently more likely to be used by whites). There’s debate over whether driving while black is a real thing or not, but many are at least convinced it’s a real thing, just as many are convinced that blacks who kill are more likely to be convicted than people who kill blacks. There are stories like the Florida mom who got 20 years for firing warning shots, although the circumstances seem a little convoluted.

Now we could argue that many of these things are not as unjust as they seem due to hidden or historical or socioeconomic or whatever factors that don’t require enduring, widespread racism, but the point is that many people have an existing worldview where black lives have no little to no value in the American justice system.

Enter Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.

It never ceases to amaze me how different people can arrive at such different yet so confident conclusions about the same event when none of them were there but they all theoretically have access to all the same information. You have liberals forming narratives like this:

Zimmerman was an overeager would-be cop, a self-appointed guardian of the neighborhood who carried a loaded gun. They were told that he profiled Martin — young, black, hooded sweatshirt — as a criminal. They heard that he stalked Martin despite the advice of a 911 operator; that the stalking led to a confrontation; and that, in the confrontation, Zimmerman fatally shot Martin in the chest.

The jurors also knew that Martin was carrying only a bag of candy and a soft drink. They knew that Martin was walking from a 7-Eleven to the home of his father’s girlfriend when he noticed a strange man in an SUV following him.

To me, and to many who watched the trial, the fact that Zimmerman recklessly initiated the tragic encounter was enough to establish, at a minimum, guilt of manslaughter.

And you have conservatives forming narratives like this:

• Zimmerman claimed to be trying to follow from a safe distance just so police would have a chance to question Martin. There had been break ins and what George did really isn’t any different than what other neighborhood watches have done in the past. Martin didn’t like being followed so he gave Zimmerman the slip, hid in the shadows, waiting for Zimmerman to pass, and then Martin approached Zimmerman from behind, initiated the confrontation and broke Zimmerman’s nose. No evidence or testimony has ever contradicted this.
• Other than the single point blank gun shot wound, Martin had no injuries. Zimmerman on the other hand looked beaten all to hell. This was consistent with Zimmerman being on the receiving end of an unexpected one sided beat down.
• When investigating officers lied and told Zimmerman that they had footage of the incident, Zimmerman was relieved, and said something along the lines of, “Thank God! I was hoping someone would have filmed to help prove what happened.” This convinced the officer that Zimmerman was telling the truth.

So, if you already believe that blacks are often unfairly treated as criminals, you see evidence of Zimmerman treating Martin like a criminal and ignoring the 911 operator, and that’s all you need because it fits your stereotype. It started with racial profiling of an innocent boy and ended in his death. You see the police’s initial refusal to investigate as more evidence of the broken justice system. You tend to ignore the details of what Zimmerman told the police or the blood on his head (or say it wasn’t bloody enough), or the details of Florida self-defense law, because Zimmerman started the whole thing and Matin was unarmed, so how could that be self-defense anyway? What more do you need to convict for murder?

On the other hand, if you already believe that blacks are often violent, you see evidence of Zimmerman getting beat up, and that’s all you need because it fits your stereotype. You see Zimmerman calling 911 before and going to the police after as evidence of his efforts to be honest and non-secretive. You see the police’s initial refusal to investigate as evidence of how obvious the self-defense was from the beginning. You tend to ignore the claims that Martin said “get off!” during his phone call, or the details of Zimmerman following Martin (or explaining the profiling as justified in light of some recent robberies).

You may beg to differ with some of my statements if you followed the story more than I did. But at the very least I think it’s possible that both of them made mistakes that led to a tragic ending. Yet, in my attempts to understand the different intense feelings here, I can’t help but think that everybody’s focusing on it way too much. This focus clouds the attention to the broader issue of criminal justice for American blacks, and makes people project things about the broader issue that may not be true.

Stand Your Ground.. Everybody

Many conservatives betrayed their stereotypes about black violence when they severely over-predicted rioting in response to the verdict. But what about liberal stereotypes about black injustice? Daily Kos says “Stand Your Ground: Just not if you’re black or female,” pointing to the Alexander story mentioned above.

Yet Zimmerman and Alexander are just two data points – what about the 131 or so other cases? Apparently blacks have used “Stand Your Ground” and been acquitted over 50% of the time, even slightly higher than the rate for whites. Atlantic Wire says blacks don’t actually benefit from that law, but I think it’s all about how you spin the numbers.

One graph shows a black killer claiming the self-defense law on a white victim and being acquitted 67% of the time! How many people with a tainted view of our justice system would expect that to be closer to zero? But wait. Is our system still racist because a white killer of a black victim was acquitted even more often (85%). Or is it not racist because whites who kill whites in self-defense get acquitted even less often than blacks (56%)?

Or maybe there’s just not enough data here to make broad claims about the justice system. But it’s definitely more complicated than you might think if you only hear about a couple of big stories.

Open Season!!!!!

What’s really bad, though, are the opinionators claiming that this verdict means it’s “open season” on “kids who wear hoodies at night,” or that it feels better to have a daughter because this verdict means sons are not safe, as if black children used to live happy, peaceful lives that are all now threatened by all the half-white, half-Hispanic racists who are now walking around with guns imagining danger so they can mow them all down.

We’ve already seen how the self-defense law may be helping protect blacks from violence as much as it “encourages” violence against them. But many blacks are troubled enough already without throwing into the mix the alarming racists who allow them to ignore the uncomfortable truth that the vast majority of blacks (93%) are killed by… other blacks, often in urban, inner-city neighborhoods.

Like 16-year-old Joseph Brewer, Jr. I can’t even figure out if they know who the shooter was, much less if he’s going to be apprehended and put on trial. Why am I seeing so many heartfelt blog posts about what Trayvon’s death implies about race relations in our country when many more Trayvons are dying unnoticed in our cities every day in shootouts that have nothing to do with race?

Maybe we should be talking about bigger things, like cycles of poverty and whether various welfare programs are making things better or worse. Maybe we should be talking about the War on Drugs, where the legal vacuum for resolving disputes among dealers and distributors and consumers basically generates violence on a daily basis. If we want to save lives, maybe we should stop devoting so much time and attention to one tragic, complicated case that got so much attention because it was so rare. Maybe we should stop criticizing racism and bad stereotypes and injustice for existing, and start viewing them as symptoms that spring from the root causes of a more general violence. Maybe that’s too hard.

Yesterday, George Zimmermann was found not guilty. Immediately millions of people reacted with outrage, disgust, anger, and other negative emotions because they wanted justice for Trayvon Martin in the form of a guilty verdict. Apparently a lot of these people were more informed about the case than the jury, because they’re all saying that the justice system is broken and failed.

You sorta follow one trial. When the jury fails to convinct a guy who kinda seemed guilty to you, you say America is broken. Gimme a break!

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) July 14, 2013

When the shooting happened over a year ago, we saw similar outrage. I said then that Everyone was Not Qualified To Have An Opinion about it. I guess everyone’s qualified to have some kind of opinion about the shooting now, but You’re Not Qualified To Have An Opinion About The Verdict. From everything I’ve seen about the case (which admittedly isn’t a whole lot), there seems to be enough confusion about what really happened that there’s at least “reasonable doubt,” and in a properly functioning justice system that should mean an acquittal. It only means guilty when your justice is determined by a majority mob of opinionated rumor-chasers.

That’s not to say that our justice system doesn’t have big problems.

The system is broken because we incarcerate more people than any other nation, half of them for non-violent drug offenses, most of whom are black and poor, contributing to continuing cycles of poverty and broken families.

It’s broken because we have an increasingly militarized police, prone to overreaction and immune from consequences.

It’s broken because we’ve legalized indefinite detention of American citizens with no right to trial, and because we have secret courts that write their own secret rules about surveillance.

Maybe it’s broken if the same law that acquitted Zimmermann convicted a black woman for 20 years.

But it’s not broken when a jury acquits someone whose guilt is not beyond reasonable doubt; two wrongs don’t make a right. Sure, let’s work to change unjust laws, to heal race relations, to protect young black men from being killed by whites, Hispanics, AND other blacks. But don’t get angry about a verdict just because you’d already made up your mind.

So the Senate has passed “The Immigration Bill,” and depending on which pundit you believe there is at least a non-trivial chance that Boehner will allow a few Republicans to join the Democrats in the House to eventually get The Bill, or something rather similar, to Obama’s desk.

As usual, I am generally skeptical that anything too good can come out of a 1,000+ pages that most Congressmen probably haven’t even read, much less understood. In general it is supposed to represent some sort of classic Washingtonian compromise, but if it’s a compromise between the welfare-happy clowns on the left and the national-security-happy clowns on the right, there may be little for even the immigration-happy libertarian types to like.

The General Idea

The Bill is supposed to include a long path to citizenship for illegal “undocumented” immigrants in exchange for a no-seriously-we’re-serious-this-time securing of the border. There are already plenty of conservative types claiming it still doesn’t do enough to secure the border and this is just another round of future-liberal-voter amnesty.

I haven’t read enough to parse those claims, and I have a difficult time taking solid stances on anything related to immigration. I’m not sure how much I really want a “secure border” anyway; economically and politically I’m all for free travel and trade and all that jazz, and I generally expect immigrants to “take” jobs but also “supply” jobs just like any other physical humans who generally occupy space around us; there may even be a net gain with educated students and entrepreneurs and the like. And there’s a strong case that existing quotas and rules are both inefficient and unjust.

The big question, of course, is whether or not The Bill will result in too many new poor citizens who stay poor, dragging down the budget in a way that offsets the economic growth of their new freedom to become better tax-paying American consumers. Any answers to that question are Large Calculations too beholden to existing biases to be very useful.

Specific Objections

However, while I’m not sure whether I support or oppose the overall premises of the bill, there are a few specifics in those 1,000+ pages that I definitely don’t like.

First, there’s the “mandatory use of E-verify, a free, online federal database of people eligible to work in the U.S.” In theory this is a good way to make sure businesses aren’t hiring illegal immigrants. In practice, it’s yet another regulation for businesses that don’t need any more incentives (*cough* Obamacare *cough*) to reduce hiring; I don’t know how the details work, but I wonder if this will further encourage contracting type arrangements over regular employment. And of course, it’s yet another example of federal encroachment into everyday life – now the government knows every time you apply for a job.

Second, there’s the rumblings of a “National ID” card. It sounds like it’s not nearly as bad as a lot of conservative emails want it to be (they’ve been freaking out about such things since at least the “REAL ID Act“), but there’s at least enough stuff about some “photo tool” to make me uneasy. The assurance that “the federal government can only access state driver’s license photos if the state and the federal government enter into an agreement to share them” doesn’t mean much if states are given incentives to do just that.

In summary, the main provisions of the bill may or may not lead to increased prosperity for the nation, but there are at least a couple freedom-encroaching things in those thousand-plus pages, and those are just the ones I know about. So I guess I’m hoping the bill doesn’t pass. But I’m not too worked up about it either way.

Two big things happened in the Middle East last week. Obama announced that the United States would send weapons to the rebel side of the civil war in Syria. The next day, a “moderate” “reformist” won Iran’s presidential election.

The first event was the latest chapter in a long history of US intervention in the Middle East. The second event was a reminder of how history is full of those interventions going wrong.

Four years ago, there were enough dissidents of the hardline Iranian Islamist regime to spark major protests (the “Green Revolution”) when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a contested second presidential term. This time, the reformers were strong enough to win a decisive election. There are plenty of arguments that this won’t result in any actual moderating from the real power figure Ayatollah Khomeini, though the signals of popular discontent are clearly strong.

But even this tiny glimmer of hope for a freer, less dangerous, less radical Iran is a reminder of how long the repercussions of botched US intervention can last. Khomeini’s regime, though thankfully and finally beginning to lose support these days, has been in power for over three decades, and was originally swept into massively popular power as he overthrew the US-backed Shah who preceded him.

The CIA helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government in the 50’s. At the time, we must have thought that guy was less bad than the other guy. But if that hadn’t happened, perhaps the Shah wouldn’t have been there to foster the anti-US sentiment that led to Khomeini’s rise in the 70’s.

Maybe Khomeini would have created his authoritative regime anyway. Maybe something worse would have happened. Like most history, it’s complicated enough that, combined with my own ignorance (reading Wiki articles doesn’t count for that much), I hesitate to take too strong of a stance.

But it sure feels like US meddling to prevent a “bad” regime in the 50’s quite possibly led to an even worse regime in the 70’s that has been handicapping the lives of millions of Iranians, and scaring international leaders around the world, for decades – a situation that we are only now even hinting at the possibility of eventually resolving.

And it is under all of this context that we learn about the United States sending arms to Syrian rebels. That situation is complicated, too. This development is only the latest in a long line of tip toes closer to the rebels that has already included medical supplies and who knows what else.

But haven’t we seen this game before? We sent weapons to Afghans in the 80’s because we considered them “less bad” than the Soviets who were attacking them, and two decades later many of those weapons ended up in the hands of the Taliban. It doesn’t take too many reports about al-Qaeda connections to Syrian rebels to wonder if we are practically begging history to repeat itself!

No doubt people like Obama and John McCain have more information about the conflict than I do (though I’m not sure how much you can learn from a photo op). I think it’s extremely likely that they only have enough information to think they know more than they do – just enough to convince themselves that “this time it’s different” and we really can tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys… even though we “may be arming Islamic rebels who may well be killing Christians,” all without doing much of anything to end the tragic civil war.

Apologies to anyone expecting a Last Week’s news update today. I’ve decided to take a bit of a blogging break. My body has been exhibiting some symptoms of stress lately, and I’ve come across some articles by people claiming that the news was making them stressed and they felt better when they stopped reading it. I don’t feel emotionally stressed, and I’ve always convinced myself that the news doesn’t make me stressed and it’s more of a hobby I greatly enjoy immersing myself in, but either way I’ve decided I have an unhealthy and unsustainable addiction to news anyway.

What started out several years ago as a lunch break checking of Google News has ballooned into multiple daily checkings of econ blogs, twitter feeds of economists and political commentators, user-submission sites like Hacker News and Reddit, raw weather data sites, C-SPAN streams…. It’s gotten to the point where I rarely go two waking hours without checking something. I can’t keep this up as a husband and now father, anyway, even if it’s not affecting my health. Do I really need all this information buzzing through my brain and forming into future blog posts as I fall asleep at night? How can I expect God to speak to me about fatherhood when I’m pulling out my phone to check Bloomberg’s commodities tab every time I sit down to poop?

So I’m going to take a break for a week or so and use the extra time to focus on both physical and spiritual exercise. I still think there’s value in being informed and informing others about what’s going on around the world, and I may come back in smaller doses.

I should emphasize that this is not a reaction to the NSA news or some newfound desire to reduce my online footprint. (Although those leaks were really exciting news for me, and I spent a lot of time consuming information about it, which perhaps helped awaken me to my news addiction.) Since I won’t be doing a blog post about it, in brief, the surveillance is worse than I thought, but still not as bad as many people think; we have hard evidence now of call logs, but as far as I know not evidence that actual calls are being recorded and analyzed. We have tech companies giving the government portal access to more easily get data on specific cases, but as far as I know not evidence that data is being full-scale exported straight to the Utah datacenter or whatever. I’m hopeful that this news and any further leak will lead to greater privacy measures. As always, be careful out there and call your Congresspeoples.

There’s a big debate in the wonkosphere these days about “rate shock,” or whether or not we should believe reports that health insurance premiums under Obamacare are going to be shockingly higher than expected, specifically for individuals buying their own plans.

Ezra Klein says these kinds of reports don’t compare plans accurately, especially for the sicker among us who have had trouble getting insurance in the first place. Josh Barro says, “Dear Young People, Your Insurance Premiums Are Going Up Because Obamacare Is Working As Planned” – Apparently Obamacare was always supposed to involve healthy folks paying more to subsidize the sick.

Peter Suderman has now slammed down the gauntlet pretty much proving that no, that’s not really what the anti-rate-shockers have been talking about at all for the last four-plus years when they were basically promising cheaper, better insurance for everybody.

But now that the cat is coming out of the bag, and we’re just debating about whether it’s been out along and how big it is, I’m starting to wonder…. is this actually starting to look a little socialist after all?

See, like everything else remotely connected to Obama, knee-jerk Republicans have been calling Obamacare “socialism” from the beginning, which has provided no shortage of derision from the left. Silly repubs, it’s not a government takeover of healthcare! It’s government giving millions of new customers to private companies! Besides, the whole individual mandate originated with Republicans in the 90’s and was first implemented by a Republican governor! Nobody calls car insurance “socialism”! It’s just like car insurance, except with a government-enforced mandate to fix the adverse selection problem! You’re already paying for it with uninsured emergency room care anyway, so this will bring down costs for everyone!

Except… now… maybe it won’t? Now the young and healthy were supposed to pay higher premiums all along?

Well, this feels a little different.

It’s not quite like Social Security or Medicare, which are more or less taken from everyone and doled out to everyone at equal (and thus demographically unsustainable) rates. It’s not quite like the income tax, which generally funds what are supposedly public goods. And it’s not quite like car insurance, where you’re protecting yourself against risk but also only paying for your own level of risk.

The closest parallels I can think of are things like Medicaid and food stamps, which are more or less funded by everyone and given to the poor. It’s not pure socialism, just as few industries these days are pure capitalism, but I think it’s a little bit socialist. (Perhaps the fact a good portion of the funds are borrowed makes it less socialist?)

So now we have Obamacare. Are we really agreeing that there will be a portion of my health insurance premium increase that is not related to my own risk of future health bills but is really only there to subsidize health bills for more expensive folks? (Yes, any given healthy person can become very sick, but presumably that risk was already taken into account in their premiums, and we are now likely talking about fairly significant net transfers from chronically healthy people to chronically sick people.) Is this basically a sort of hidden Medicaid tax (or how about “charity tax”) with a private insurance middleman?

I’m not necessarily saying that’s a bad thing. I’m not necessarily saying that’s not something our society might want to do. Obamacare proponents have claimed that the people who seem most concerned about rate shock tend to seem least concerned about the people who never could qualify for insurance in the first place. That may be so, but I think the proponents seem least concerned about the crowding out of charity.

If the government effectively raises my “charity tax” by forcing me to contribute to specific funds for others, then I have fewer funds available for other forms of charitable giving. Now you may think that the government can spend that money better than I can, or that there would otherwise be a shortage of it. I may disagree, though not too forcefully; while I could point to all the abuses and moral hazards and other unintended consequences of, say, food stamps, I also believe they probably genuinely help a lot of people in unfortunate circumstances, and I’m okay with some compromises on those kinds of little bits of socialism (not that I’d mind a lot of reform).

So maybe we do want to redistribute wealth from healthy people to sick people, and maybe we want Obamacare to do it. That’s a discussion we can certainly have. But let’s stop pretending it’s not kinda sorta a little bit of…… socialism.

I have to admit I chuckled when the WashingtonPost WonkBlog declared, “The economy is holding up surprisingly well in a year of austerity.” Of course, this isn’t that surprising to those of us who never really bought into the sequestermongering. But it’s nice to see even the liberal, mainstream, doom-peddler types admitting that the economy isn’t acting very doomy right now:

Housing prices rose faster over the past year than they have in the past seven, according to data out Tuesday. Consumer confidence hit its highest level in five years. The stock market rallied another 0.6 percent as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500, leaving it just short of an all-time high reached last week. And the national retail price of gasoline fell for six days straight through Monday and is down 16 cents a gallon since late February.

Since it never shows up, the inevitable pain of austerity keeps getting pushed back. The world didn’t collapse on New Year’s Day because, well, the spending “cuts” were delayed two months and the tax jumps took a little while to get figured into people’s paychecks. The world didn’t collapse on March 1 because, well, the departments would take awhile to adjust to the changed budget of the sequester. Now the pain is apparently delayed until later this year, or maybe even next year!

(Maybe the only thing surprising about the sequester is that the experts are so surprised. How long before “sequester doom” becomes the left’s “hyperinflation”?)

Is Spending Always the Answer?

It certainly may be true that the pain of the sequester will eventually ricochet through the economy, but it sure looks like the Keynesians have a pretty unfalsifiable position. When we increased spending and the economy was still bad, the response was: Oh, it was worse than we thought! We should be spending more! Now when we decrease spending and the economy gets better, the response is: Oh, it wasn’t as bad as we thought! But it would be even better if we were spending more!

Again, it’s not impossible for those positions to be true. But to a non-Keynesian it sure feels like they’re spinning any circumstances through their existing bias to justify more spending.

What About the Tax Increases?

Of course, conservative fiscal hawks have their bias problems, too. Tax increases are always supposed to be bad, but in January the payroll tax for all working Americans and the income tax for rich Americans both returned to previously higher levels. And what happened?

The deficit shrunk faster than expected! The economy is still adding jobs! Despite all that rhetoric about not raising taxes on wealthy job creators, apparently we are nowhere near that part of the Laffer curve where increased taxes leads to lower revenue! (Not that this should be a surprise; the economy had healthy periods with those exact tax rates in the 90’s.)

But conservatives still have plenty of conservativey explanations for the healthy economy, like the huge boom in oil and gas output. We could even speculate that some of the limited government expenditures are reducing its influence over the private sector and leaving more room to grow, although I doubt the marginal differences here would be enough to noticeably offset the short-term effect of the direct missing government dollars.

Conservatives have a big excuse waiting in the wings next time the economy turns sour, too: Obamacare (indeed, many conservatives aren’t even waiting). Any dip in the stock market or rise in inflation or slowdown in job creation will be blamed on the disincentives created by that giant healthcare legislation, and in some cases, they may actually be right. In a complex economy, both sides are pretty good at spinning both good and bad news as evidence that strengthens their pre-existing positions!

As for me, I’m hesitant to put increased confidence in any of my left-right biases about the effects of taxing and spending based on the economy’s post-sequester behavior so far. But the surprise of the experts does increase the confidence in my bias that those experts are overconfident in their ability to predict effects, not only of the stimulus and the sequester but also of a lot of the other interventions (a.k.a. reforms) they’re so fond of proposing.