And Sansa is extremely irritating (up until book 4 or thereabouts once she's grown the hell up). But then she's basically a character from a medieval romance novel dropped into an authentically medieval setting.
Actually there are moves in New Zealand to ban kosher butchery on animal rights grounds. But not halal butchery since apparently the local halal butchers were willing willing to make sufficient concessions to meet the proposed new standards.
But Murali, don't you know by now that the US and Europe are the only real places on earth? Why all those other places are just backdrop. Sure armies might go there and electronics might come back, but they don't really exist the way Europe and the good old US of A do.
As a government employee in my own country, you have my sympathies. As always the politicians play their ego games and those of us further down the tree get caught in the crossfire.
It's times like this that I'm glad that my country has a Parliamentary System where government shutdown over Budget wrangling is severely unlikely.
While I think Koz is right that liberals commonly have a big gap between aspiration and policy in their ideas, also think this is true of essentially everyone. You point out that Conservatives also do it. Hell, even libertarians do it (after all, deregulation can be as complex as regulating in the first place).
I'm a policy analyst so I deal with this stuff every day - working out how to turn a high-minded goal into a series of practical actions. It's hard work, involving mountains of picky detail, and policy is often rushed through without properly figuring out how it is supposed to accomplish the goal.
In fact the whole sorry state of things ties in quite well with Tyler Cowen's view of politics as driven by status competiton.
Incidentally, there is a tool often used in policy circles that will help you if you're worried about falling into this trap. It's called Intervention Logic. The simple version of it is that you start with your end goal on one side of the page and your proposed policy on the other. The try to develop a causal chain linking policy to goal. Focus very carefully on actions (e.g. the government will do X which causes Group A to do Y which causes Group B to do Z which achieves our goal). If you can, also try to trace out what unintended effects might result from each action in the causal chain.
I can imagine a truly hilarious (though severely unlikely) alternate reality in which both Obama and McCain were ruled out of the presidency (The former by a birther judge, the latter by a nitpicky one) leading Bob Barr to win the presidency after winning 0 states.
My attempt at a counter (I honestly don't know how much stock to put in this):
Placing outsized focus on national borders makes people more likely to think of people in other countries as "Others" to be mistrusted. This leads to greater demand for trade barriers by voters.
A world in which people thought national borders were no big deal could have more international trade and therefore lower international and intranational violence.
Peace between nations is important, but you can have no international violence and still have a lot of intranational violence.
I'm still generally against intervention because I don't think you should tamper with a complex system unless you are very sure of what you are doing but the principle of inviolable national borders still sits badly with me.
1) It effectively treats people as the property of whoever runs their country. This would be bad enough if applied to a democratic country but to a dictatorship? It's like being kidnapped and then being told by the police that they won't rescue you because you are in the kidnapper's house and they don't feel it would be right to intrude on their privacy.
2) It suggests that international law is especially relevant to the conduct of war. The central concept of a sovereign nation is that it can legitimately reply to any attempt to tell it what to do with "you and who's army?" This is particularity true of the US where the concept of forcing it to do anything or even sanctioning it in any meaningful way is patently absurd. The only group with any real power over US policy is the WTO, and that power is very domain-specific.
That's not to say that I think Libyan intervention is a good idea. There's no sign that there has been any real thinking done about what the intervention is trying to achieve in a concrete way, nor any way of determining when that goal has been met. That pretty much guarantees failure.
Case in point: his ideas about Alexander the Great fighting irregular warfare are complete nonsense.
Wait, what? Macedon dominated because they used longer spears than the Greeks, and in hoplite warfare it basically comes down to the longest spear winning. Irregular troops would be pretty much useless against hoplite formations, you can't destroy a cohesive body of heavy infantry with skirmishers unless the skirmishers have assault rifles.
Its surprising that someone claiming to be a historian would make a mistake like that.
So how do you get from this forest to that one? I’m not sure it’s possible, and even if it were, I’m not sure we’d ever be willing, as a society, to let the small fires burn.
And so there must be other ways, some mish-mash of market and state and cultural ideas that can at once address our need to let the market ecosystem exist in as free a form as possible, but which also tackles the risk and inequity of such a wild system.
What I'd recommend is a system that focuses on ameliorating the negative effects of those fires, rather than trying to prevent them. In other words, a good welfare safety net that will stop you from being utterly impoverished by you losing your job. That way the fires burn out, but suffering is contained.
As to how to make it happen, I don't think its possible. I've pretty much given up on the US, the policy environment just isn't hospitable enough to reason. Eventually your government will overstress itself to the point where it defaults, and then your economy will be severely disrupted.
Neither Australia nor New Zealand is especially homogeneous. They're both new world countries that have significant immigration.
As for unions, I can't speak for Australia but in New Zealand there are unions, but our labour relations laws are quite different from the US. For one thing union shops are illegal, for another you can only strike while renegotiating your employment contract (including pay or conditions).
As for how well minorities do, outcomes are worse than average, but my intuition is that they do better than minorities in the US. The fact that funding is allocated centrally based on income (so a decile 1 school gets more funding than a decile 10 school does) probably has something to do with this, but I don't know how much.
And the problem with not experimenting is that you either do the same stupid thing over and over again, or you keep changing what you're doing without knowing whether its working or not.
When I look at the education system, what I see is a knowledge deficit. There's a lot we don't know about good teaching, and local circumstances definitely matter, as you say.
The logical thing for me then is to experiment, let schools do different things and see what works. Of course to do that you have to be able to define "works" in a rigorous and measurable way, and that leads to what I see as the big problem of education: policy makers aren't sure what they want education to accomplish. Any policy that lacks specific, feasible, measurable, attributable goals has practically no hope of success. Those goals need not be centrally determined, but some one has to be willing to sate what they want a school to accomplish, and then figure out how to check if its doing that.
I'm sorry, but your comment has precisely what to do with anything? Yes indeed the US was instrumental in the Pacific theatre in WWII (I'd say they were incidental at best in the European and and African theatres, but they definitely mattered in the Pacific), and some of the things that the US military does now (especially the navy) are important for global security. But essentially none of that matters when discussing economic policy, and you were the first person to raise it.
I'll go along with this, but then I'm a professional policy wonk so I basically do that for a living.
For me the key situation where regulation is appropriate is market failure (a term I can define fairly precisely if necessary). Show me a genuine market failure and I'll concede an opening for regulation. The policy would still have to pass a benefit-cost test of course, but that's not unreasonable is it?
I don't consider distributional concerns a reason for direct regulation in markets, but I'm OK with transfer payments so long as they're not going to break the bank.
The Koch bothers, love them or hate them, primarily are politically active as individuals (absolutely and properly protected), rather than through their corporate entities.
This is what confuses me about the calls to restrict corporate speech. Really rich people can actually buy advertising to advocate their ideas without needed a corporate form to collate their money. But less wealthy people may need it since the average person can't buy a lot of airtime on their own.
So how does restricting corporate speech not primarily hurt middle class people more than rich people? If I were trying to bolster plutocracy in the US the first thing I would do is make it hard for people to coordinate political advocacy through corporations, that way only my fat cat buddies would be able to make their voices heard.
Right, in the face of existential threat it might make sense to move away from an allocative efficient market to favour the defence part of the economy. For the same reason, I can think of a couple of national security exceptions to free trade (they're narrow though).
And of course CHina is favouring the welfare of narrow groups. So does the US, so do EU countries. Its a fundamental prediction of Public Choice Theory.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “TV Review: A Game of Thrones (HBO)”
And Sansa is extremely irritating (up until book 4 or thereabouts once she's grown the hell up). But then she's basically a character from a medieval romance novel dropped into an authentically medieval setting.
On “Muslims and the need for reform or, at least, better PR”
Actually there are moves in New Zealand to ban kosher butchery on animal rights grounds. But not halal butchery since apparently the local halal butchers were willing willing to make sufficient concessions to meet the proposed new standards.
"
But Murali, don't you know by now that the US and Europe are the only real places on earth? Why all those other places are just backdrop. Sure armies might go there and electronics might come back, but they don't really exist the way Europe and the good old US of A do.
On “Several Things That Aren’t Happening Here.”
As a government employee in my own country, you have my sympathies. As always the politicians play their ego games and those of us further down the tree get caught in the crossfire.
It's times like this that I'm glad that my country has a Parliamentary System where government shutdown over Budget wrangling is severely unlikely.
On “I actually kind of like the notion of ‘folk Marxism’ but still…”
While I think Koz is right that liberals commonly have a big gap between aspiration and policy in their ideas, also think this is true of essentially everyone. You point out that Conservatives also do it. Hell, even libertarians do it (after all, deregulation can be as complex as regulating in the first place).
I'm a policy analyst so I deal with this stuff every day - working out how to turn a high-minded goal into a series of practical actions. It's hard work, involving mountains of picky detail, and policy is often rushed through without properly figuring out how it is supposed to accomplish the goal.
In fact the whole sorry state of things ties in quite well with Tyler Cowen's view of politics as driven by status competiton.
Incidentally, there is a tool often used in policy circles that will help you if you're worried about falling into this trap. It's called Intervention Logic. The simple version of it is that you start with your end goal on one side of the page and your proposed policy on the other. The try to develop a causal chain linking policy to goal. Focus very carefully on actions (e.g. the government will do X which causes Group A to do Y which causes Group B to do Z which achieves our goal). If you can, also try to trace out what unintended effects might result from each action in the causal chain.
On “Birtherism”
I can imagine a truly hilarious (though severely unlikely) alternate reality in which both Obama and McCain were ruled out of the presidency (The former by a birther judge, the latter by a nitpicky one) leading Bob Barr to win the presidency after winning 0 states.
On “No country for old dictators”
That's a very interesting perspective.
My attempt at a counter (I honestly don't know how much stock to put in this):
Placing outsized focus on national borders makes people more likely to think of people in other countries as "Others" to be mistrusted. This leads to greater demand for trade barriers by voters.
A world in which people thought national borders were no big deal could have more international trade and therefore lower international and intranational violence.
"
Oh, I understand your point. I don't think the US should intervene, I just think that sovereignty is a bad reason not to.
"
Peace between nations is important, but you can have no international violence and still have a lot of intranational violence.
I'm still generally against intervention because I don't think you should tamper with a complex system unless you are very sure of what you are doing but the principle of inviolable national borders still sits badly with me.
"
I see two major problem with that logic:
1) It effectively treats people as the property of whoever runs their country. This would be bad enough if applied to a democratic country but to a dictatorship? It's like being kidnapped and then being told by the police that they won't rescue you because you are in the kidnapper's house and they don't feel it would be right to intrude on their privacy.
2) It suggests that international law is especially relevant to the conduct of war. The central concept of a sovereign nation is that it can legitimately reply to any attempt to tell it what to do with "you and who's army?" This is particularity true of the US where the concept of forcing it to do anything or even sanctioning it in any meaningful way is patently absurd. The only group with any real power over US policy is the WTO, and that power is very domain-specific.
That's not to say that I think Libyan intervention is a good idea. There's no sign that there has been any real thinking done about what the intervention is trying to achieve in a concrete way, nor any way of determining when that goal has been met. That pretty much guarantees failure.
"
Win!
On “Leo Strauss, Meet John Stuart Mill”
Ah, I see. That would certainly explain my confusion. Never mind then.
"
Wait, what? Macedon dominated because they used longer spears than the Greeks, and in hoplite warfare it basically comes down to the longest spear winning. Irregular troops would be pretty much useless against hoplite formations, you can't destroy a cohesive body of heavy infantry with skirmishers unless the skirmishers have assault rifles.
Its surprising that someone claiming to be a historian would make a mistake like that.
On “Free Market as Forest”
Except that New Zealand doesn't have a medallion system and our taxi drivers aren't starving to death.
"
I support this idea, I think it has something to offer the left and the right.
"
What I'd recommend is a system that focuses on ameliorating the negative effects of those fires, rather than trying to prevent them. In other words, a good welfare safety net that will stop you from being utterly impoverished by you losing your job. That way the fires burn out, but suffering is contained.
As to how to make it happen, I don't think its possible. I've pretty much given up on the US, the policy environment just isn't hospitable enough to reason. Eventually your government will overstress itself to the point where it defaults, and then your economy will be severely disrupted.
On “Subsidiarity and public education”
Neither Australia nor New Zealand is especially homogeneous. They're both new world countries that have significant immigration.
As for unions, I can't speak for Australia but in New Zealand there are unions, but our labour relations laws are quite different from the US. For one thing union shops are illegal, for another you can only strike while renegotiating your employment contract (including pay or conditions).
As for how well minorities do, outcomes are worse than average, but my intuition is that they do better than minorities in the US. The fact that funding is allocated centrally based on income (so a decile 1 school gets more funding than a decile 10 school does) probably has something to do with this, but I don't know how much.
On “Defending teachers from the noise machine”
And the problem with not experimenting is that you either do the same stupid thing over and over again, or you keep changing what you're doing without knowing whether its working or not.
"
When I look at the education system, what I see is a knowledge deficit. There's a lot we don't know about good teaching, and local circumstances definitely matter, as you say.
The logical thing for me then is to experiment, let schools do different things and see what works. Of course to do that you have to be able to define "works" in a rigorous and measurable way, and that leads to what I see as the big problem of education: policy makers aren't sure what they want education to accomplish. Any policy that lacks specific, feasible, measurable, attributable goals has practically no hope of success. Those goals need not be centrally determined, but some one has to be willing to sate what they want a school to accomplish, and then figure out how to check if its doing that.
On “Incoherent Democracy, Again”
But we don't get the government we deserve. We all get the government the median voter deserves :(
On “Defending teachers from the noise machine”
You have an eccentric definition of easy.
On “On Free Markets”
I'm sorry, but your comment has precisely what to do with anything? Yes indeed the US was instrumental in the Pacific theatre in WWII (I'd say they were incidental at best in the European and and African theatres, but they definitely mattered in the Pacific), and some of the things that the US military does now (especially the navy) are important for global security. But essentially none of that matters when discussing economic policy, and you were the first person to raise it.
So what exactly was your point?
"
I'll go along with this, but then I'm a professional policy wonk so I basically do that for a living.
For me the key situation where regulation is appropriate is market failure (a term I can define fairly precisely if necessary). Show me a genuine market failure and I'll concede an opening for regulation. The policy would still have to pass a benefit-cost test of course, but that's not unreasonable is it?
I don't consider distributional concerns a reason for direct regulation in markets, but I'm OK with transfer payments so long as they're not going to break the bank.
On “Labor Roundtable: Thoughts on a Libertarian-Labor Alliance”
This is what confuses me about the calls to restrict corporate speech. Really rich people can actually buy advertising to advocate their ideas without needed a corporate form to collate their money. But less wealthy people may need it since the average person can't buy a lot of airtime on their own.
So how does restricting corporate speech not primarily hurt middle class people more than rich people? If I were trying to bolster plutocracy in the US the first thing I would do is make it hard for people to coordinate political advocacy through corporations, that way only my fat cat buddies would be able to make their voices heard.
On “Why don’t we treat free trade like global warming?”
Right, in the face of existential threat it might make sense to move away from an allocative efficient market to favour the defence part of the economy. For the same reason, I can think of a couple of national security exceptions to free trade (they're narrow though).
And of course CHina is favouring the welfare of narrow groups. So does the US, so do EU countries. Its a fundamental prediction of Public Choice Theory.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.