Greg Sanders

Purity is obsolete

I’ve been watching an interesting fight between libertarian Will Wilkinson and conservative Ross Douthaht. They’re fighting over Jonathan Haidt’s concept of five pillars of morality: harm/care; fairness/reciprocity; in-group; authority; and purity. Liberals tend to like the first two, conservatives go for all five. Wilkinson gives a great quick summary of Haidt’s larger argument:

As Jon notes, many liberals wonder why the in-group, authority, and purity dimensions of the moral sense count as moral at all. Why doesn’t harm/care and fairness/reciprocity just exhaust the moral field? With characteristic ecumenism, Jon cautions us against underestimating the function of the conservative sentiments in a successful society. “The great conservative insight,” Jon says, “is that order is really hard to achieve, it’s really precious, and really ready to lose.”

However, Wilkinson doesn’t buy it:

The lesson, it seems to me, is that it is dangerous to become too thoroughly liberal, for that way chaos lies. What Jon needs to show is that there is a threshold on the conservative channels of the moral equalizer below which social stability is threatened. In the talk, he barely gestures toward evidence to this effect... Indeed, my sense is that the societies in which the space between high liberal settings and low conservative settings is the greatest–that is, the most imbalanced–are by and large the best places for human beings to live...

If the conservative dimensions are so important, Jon needs to explain why the people of the advanced market democracies are so much more liberal than they used to be, so much less conservative, and yet so much less disordered (i.e., less violence, less war, etc.)...

But I think he’s making a mistake if he think his work points toward the importance of the conservative sentiments. It’s pointing me toward a clearer grasp of the ecological conditions under which those sentiments are functional and adaptive. And we aren’t in them.

Douthat, unlike a lot of the commenters on Haidt’s presentation, does buy the moral breakdown and not surprisingly disagrees with Wilkinson. He buys that there’s some evidence that we may be moving in that direction, but that on the whole it’s too soon to tell. In an earlier argument, he also noted that if we diminish the role for family, community, and religion we’re likely opening the door to a larger state.

Anyhow, I’m not a libertarian, I tend to think there is some utility in in-group and authority although I certainly thing they’re far less important than harm-care or fairness. However, I do agree with Wilkinson on Purity. I think purity has a few uses: preventing self-harm, avoiding getting on a slippery slope for harming others, avoiding disease and food poisoning, and . However, the first two are just functions of harm/care and can be treated as such. The third is where the evolutionary advantage of purity comes in, but we have science now to tell us what’s actually healthy, it’s time to put away childish things.

To be fair to conservatives, Haidt does note that liberals can go for purity when it comes to organic food or not watching television or such. When these things have a basis in health, fine; but I’m quite willing to say that while it’s fine to argue about what we should eat or watch, don’t get self-righteous about it. Most of us have our guilty pleasures and in moderation that’s fine.

Interestingly, I think Christianity makes a partial break with purity rules. Jesus is constantly breaking purity restrictions, sometimes even foolishly so; sorry Jesus, but we should actually wash our hands before eating. Not a moral thing, but a good idea nonetheless. I think a lot of Christian theology gets at the idea that none of us is really pure, so we should stop judging others for lack of purity. However, Jesus as the perfect sacrificial lamb brings those issues back to the fore. I should also note that I’ve heard that the Gospel depiction of Judaism’s purity rules in practice is rather exaggerated.

Battleground polling

This bit of awesome via Ezra Klein:

This is really surprisingly professional. Not sure how big the sample size was, but I’m rather amused by the polling results at the end. Interviewer had a good dry sense of humor.

Peace between Google and books!

I heard news of this first through my friend Monica and then my mother, essentially my librarian news network. There’s now a settlement between Google and book publishers over copyright infringement issues. Short version is that Google was scanning and posting a lot of library books using an opt-out system. The opt-out system was necessary because there’s a lot of orphaned works out there and tracking down who had rights to all of them would be cost prohibitive.

Neil Netanel over at Balkinization has some details on the deal:

Under the proposed settlement agreement (which as of this writing I have just read quickly), copyright holders will have the right to opt-out of the Project for any given book, but the default rule will be that Google may display 20% of the text of copyrighted out of print books and may sell access to viewing the entire text online. Google will also continue to be able to display short snippets of copyrighted in print books and to display and make available for user download the full text off public domain books in response to user’s search queries. Copyrighted and in print books will be made available for display (beyond the short snippets), online viewing, and download per agreement with each copyright holder. Under the settlement agreement, all public libraries in the United States will be offered a free online portal to Google’s digitized collection and Google will offer institutional subscriptions to colleges and universities.

He notes two worries. First, if Google had just fought and won under fair use then other people may better be able to get out under the thumb of increasingly burdensome copyright rules. Second, barriers to entry are probably high enough to give Google a monopoly in this realm.

Curses, they've seen through my plan

As loyal readers may recall, I recently discussed how we could weaponize financial innovation by letting a lot of our financial wizards go overseas to new financial hubs to ruin their economies instead of ours.

According to the Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post, this plan is already in motion as investment bankers from Europe and the US seek refuge from the financial crisis in more stable markets:

In a phrase often cited by British brokers and bankers, "it's Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai, or goodbye."

Overcoming a long-held wariness by many Americans about living in the Middle East, growing numbers of U.S. investment bankers and other financial professionals are at least mulling moving their careers here, having lost their jobs or fearing they might.

Unfortunately, they seem wise to our game:

Many here are unhappy with U.S. financial and foreign policies, and dubious about what's still regarded as Americans' brasher way of doing business...

"So, you've managed to screw up your banks, and now you've come to screw up ours?" a Saudi investment executive in white robe and white-flecked beard said of the attitude toward job-seeking Americans.

Oh well, I do feel confident that Europeans are just as capable of causing things to go to hell in a poor regulated financial environment, so the end product may well be the same.

Battle for California

The fight on Proposition 8, the attempt to ban gay marriage in California, has tightened some in the polls, apparently thanks to a dishonest advertising blitz by opponents. Apparently the Church of Latter Day Saints is funding a lot of them. Thankfully, they haven’t tightened so much that this isn’t winnable.

Here’s one of the new vote no ads:

At this point, Obama’s probably got it in the bag, so it makes sense to focus donations to favored issues or close Senate races. Anyways a sites you can donate to No on Prop 8, they did the ad above and Ezra Klein has a second one. Human Rights Campaign also has a site, but for some reason I’m having trouble linking to it.

I’m going with No on prop 8 as I like their ads.

I have confidence that the further spread of gay marriage in America is inevitable, Connecticut being the latest example. However, the pace will be determined by how hard and how smart we fight.

Also, so long as we’re talking California, vote yes on prop 2 and prop 1!

Warm is good

Fiance pointed me to this article in the Baltimore Sun on the connection between feeling warm and how you judge other people:

To their surprise, they found that people who held a cup of hot coffee for 10 to 25 seconds warmed to a perfect stranger. Holding a cup of iced coffee had the opposite effect.

If you want to make a good impression, advised study author Lawrence E. Williams, a University of Colorado at Boulder assistant professor of marketing, a fresh cup of coffee "may bias the situation in your favor."

Interesting. Also I think this hypothesis was anticipated a few years agoby the Grand Theft Auto series.

Who wants to read about contracting?

Federal contracting has been in the news some lately. Back during the first debate, Sen. McCain called for the elimination of cost-plus contracting because he thought it encouraged contractors to waste money. Cost-plus contracting, if not paired with proper incentives, doesn’t give much reason to save money. However, when you’re talking about R&D contracts, cost-plus can be the way to go because you might not have a firm idea of the difficulty of the project. However, as this two-pager shows, cost-plus is showing up in a lot of service contracts as well.

In other contracting news, just this morning the Carol D. Leonnig of the WPost published an article finding $5 billion dollars of contracts for supposedly being implemented by small businesses instead being held by the big boys. Some further research found that more than $600 million dollars explicitly set aside for small businesses apparently went to large companies.

The larger problem in contracting is pretty straight forward: there’s an imbalance between the burgeoning hundreds of billions the government pays to contractors and the relatively small contract management work force.

Economics of Conflict

I assume my readers are sufficiently cynical to realize that conflicts are often driven by economic factors. However, that still leaves the question of how those factors work.

Here’s some interesting new data from Dani Rodrik

One of my graduate students, Oeindrila Dube, has written a fascinating paper (jointly with Juan Vargas) on the determinants of Colombia’s civil war, and how world prices for its major exports (coffee and oil) affect the intensity of the conflict.

The central question is this: do higher world prices enhance or reduce the conflict? You could make arguments in both directions. Lower prices increase reduce incomes, and may make it less difficult for individuals to be recruited into guerilla or militia forces. On the other hand, lower prices make the underlying resource base less valuable and reduce the spoils over which the two sides can fight.

He links to a Slate article that provides a layman’s summary. The short version is that higher prices on labor intensive resources, like farm goods, reduce civil conflict because the wealth is spread around. For capital intensive products, like oil, the trend goes the opposite way in what’s called the resource curse.

Tried my first Riff Trax last night

Riff Trax is the spiritual successor to MST3Kand stars [Bill Corbett (who voiced Crow T. Robot)], Kevin Murphy (who voiced Tom Servo), and [Mike Nelson] typically though this time Josh Fruhlinger from Comics Curmudgeon was on instead of him.

In any event, it works by selling audio tracks you can play alongside the movie. They include a few tools to help you sync up, namely telling the start and end time of each scene and regularly having the Disembobulator (sp?) repeat a line of the movie. I think they’ve got a special player for doing a DVD and a Riff Trak at the same, but I just played the Trak on my laptop and the DVD on Fiance’s TV/PS2.

So the best part about this format is that they aren’t including the original film so they don’t have to negotiate the rights and can do whatever they want. We caught Spider-Man 2 and found the commentary consistently funny. Price seems to go between $2.99 and $3.99 which isn’t a steal but I definitely think I got my money’s worth.

I do miss the skits from the original show, although obviously they don’t really work with this format. Similarly there’s no larger plot or characters, just guys making fun of movies. Finally, this Trak at least ended at the end credits, so if what you really want is end credit mocking, well, you’re very strange.

[Update: Fixed names after fiance pointed out I screwed up who was in on this one.]

Financial WMDs

In talking about the financial crisis with a friend at work, we argued about the merits of financial innovation. Obviously the finance sector does come out with some good new things; the original 30 year mortgage seems to have been a good practical idea. But a lot of the recent innovations, like adjustable rate mortgages and credit default swaps seem to produce short term benefits for long term destabilization.

Of course, the success of New York as the financial capital of the world did require financial innovation. If we limited leverage to ten times and made derivatives publicly traded or the like we might have lost lead status to London or Singapore or the like. That would mean job losses here and possibly some rather bright people immigrating away.

That observation made me realize we can weaponize financial innovation. Send some our best and brightest to Moscow, Shanghai, or some rich emirate. Give them ten, maybe twenty years and soon enough those countries may have their economy collapse and be borrowing from us instead of vice versa.

More seriously, there are good things that come from the finance sector. We certainly want one of a reasonable size, we need to get credit flowing again all the more in a downturn. But unless people who need and can use credit aren’t getting it (e.g. the positive innovation of micro-financing) then financial innovation is not producing anything but profits for the traders by moving money around.

This year's key demographic: a guy named Joe

First, as a quick programming note, I’m having a few friends, such as Moti, Arwen, and my fiance, post on the blog when they have something to say. Thanks guys! I may add a few more depending on interest. Consider this a bit of a consolation prize for my laxity in posting over the past few months, probably time to downgrade myself to posting at least four times each week or the like. As health issues get dealt with that rate should rise again.

Second, on the debate tonight. John McCain seems to think that there are relatively few Americans that want to "spread the wealth" and a great number of Americans that are ready to buy their own business (like Joe the Plumber, who had apparently talked to Obama). I’ll take that bet.

That said, I do give points to McCain for consistently opposing Ethanol subsidies. The corn varieties don’t produce an energy efficient fuel and raise food prices.

Finally, this from Ezra Klein, for a slightly more effective version of the McCain guilt by association strategy.

Also, maybe gold-plated heart transplants.

I just watched listened to the most recent debate.  Now, I'm not an expert on politics or anything like that (you'd have to look to Greg for that kind of brilliance), but I do know one thing:

Vote for McCain!  He'll give you vouchers and five thousand dollars so you can buy a gold-plated Cadillac!

Seriously!  Now you might say, "Arwen, those five thousand dollars go towards health insurance.  Why would you spend it on a gold-plated Cadillac?"  My answer is McCain said we should.  You see, giving each of us five thousand dollars also gives each of us the same kind of health insurance people with gold-plated Cadillacs have.  It's five thousand dollars for each of us to use as we wish!  So I'm thinking that in order to get that kind of health insurance... why, each of us needs a gold-plated Cadillac.  Then we really WOULD all have the same health insurance!  Brilliant?  I think so.

Oh, and the vouchers thing... that's his solution to education or something.  We can use those vouchers to send our kids to schools where former military are teaching without teacher's certification.  It'll be awesome.

America has a bright and busy future.  Gold-plated Cadillac, here I come.

Lucky Duckies

Post over at the Plank by Robert Gordon and James Kavaal describe separate fury-inducing statements by McCain and the WSJ.

McCain advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin slammed Obama's tax plan today, saying, "Obama has proposed a ‘tax cut' for 95 percent of people when, literally, almost 40 percent pay no federal income taxes at all." He cited a recent New York Post editorial labeling Obama's tax cuts "welfare."

The 40% thing is likely true, but we're talking about workers who do get hit by regressive payroll and other taxes.  I'm not even going to bother arguing against this, it's enough to repeat the claim -- McCain's most (only?) reputable economic adviser thinks that cutting taxes to the bottom 40% of American taxpayers is a welfare payment."

As for the Journal:

But McCain is echoing Phil Gramm's and Newt Gingrich's old claim here that tax credits for low-income workers amount to welfare. The Wall Street Journal editorial page charmingly referred to people too poor to pay income taxes as "lucky duckies."

Tom the Dancing Bug satirizes this fairly regularly in his comics, but I always figured he came up with term.  I knew he was making fun of the WSJ's abominable editorial page, but I figured that bit was hyperbole.  Man.

We need to hit the bubbles before they hit us

Kevin drum comments on an interesting idea in bubble popping from Mark Thoma.  I'm trying to do more but shorter posts so I'll just give a quick summary.

Currently the Fed watches inflation and tends to raise the interest rate at which it lends to bank when inflation seems to be heading up.  However, assets like houses or stocks aren't included.  So those areas can overheat and the Fed, by default, won't take action.  Breaking that default requires predicting a bubble, which can be hard, do it too early and you'll miss out on productive growth.

So if we start having the Fed respond with higher interest in the case of increasing asset inflation then things will tend to cool down on likely bubbles, but in moderation.   Of course extensive judgment would still be required, but we'd have a common metric to argue about and a default course of action.

Photo by Isazappy used under a creative commons license.

Last day to register to vote in MD

Today’s the deadline. Here’s a site to check if you’re registered.

And here’s the forms and instructions. I think you’re good if you get it in the mail today.

Rock Band 2: Quickie review

Harmonix is one of those rare companies that, when making a sequel, keeps all the good stuff and then does some tweaking to answer fan complaints. Of course, the rhythm game genre is particularly suited to this model, but the broad ideas are still applicable to many other series. So my comments on the original largely hold.

A few notable improvements:

• No fail mode. Good for parties, as it lets people without much gaming skill participate.
• The ability to assign bandmates for instruments that don’t have real people playing them. This lets you use more of the characters you create and finally banish those weird KISS wanna-bes.
• Bands have no designated leader and you can swap in any avatars. Also single player mode is now folded into the band world tour.
• Some fun new gimmicks, like the occasional music video starring your band and greater variety in challenges.

I haven’t upgraded my instruments, so I can’t say anything about the new equipment. I may get a new guitar at some point, as mine requires increasing contortions and spins to invoke overdrive. So, what still could be fixed in the next Rock Band?

• The per song instrument difficulty indicator is quite useful when making your own set list. It should be incorporated in the other ways of picking songs. It’s harder to risk going from Medium to Hard when you don’t know what’s coming.
• To my taste, there’s too many random set lists. They give a better idea of how hard they’re going to be, but they’re still pretty opaque. This is particularly annoying because there’s no way to blackball songs you don’t like. To me, all the random sets look like space fillers.
• Downloadable content should be worked into world tour mode. These songs show up when you make a set list or get one at random, but they’re not available as stand alone songs in any city.
• This is pretty minor, but it’d be nice to be able to designate both a male and a female vocalist as fill-ins when you don’t have a singer.

I’ve heard rumors of a mode that will let you record and watch your bands performances. This would be nice as normally when you’re playing you’re a bit too busy to really pay attention. More importantly, the Rock Band website now has a beta version that lets you take character pictures and make merchandise out of it. Currently it’s still a bit buggy and at times quite slow, but the functionality is still great. More on that after I’ve had more of a chance to play around with it.

If you don't lose, you don't need revenge

Spencer Ackerman notes that McCain has been through a few cycles of bad political behavior and then seeking forgiveness. Past examples include his involvement in the Keating 5 scandal and the refusing to call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina courthouse. The present campaign is a third example:

Melissa, Josh and Baratunde have truly excellent posts cataloging the McCain-Palin campaign’s descent into outright bigotry and Nixonlandia. Earlier this week I suggested that the progressive counteroffensive should aim to destroy McCain’s reputation for all time. After an evening discussing this with friends over beers, I’m wondering about the logistics of such a campaign...

Do not allow him to disavow the course that he’s chosen. Let him be
known forever as what he’s chosen to be in the twilight of his career:
a brazen, craven coward.

I generally agree with Ackerman, he’s my go-to guy on counter-insurgency, but on this I think he’s completely wrong. McCain’s reversal of course on the Confederate flag may not have made a huge difference, but after the Keating 5 McCain completely devoted himself to campaign finance reform. I know it’s fashionable now to knock spending limits as an inferior implementation versus just multiplying or directly subsidizing small donors. However, McCain-Feingold beat the heck out of the degraded post-Watergate system. Those reforms facilitated the rise of internet donations which were used so ably by Howard Dean and then Barack Obama.

Could we finish his reputation? Probably. But we’d do far better to turn him. Forgiveness shouldn’t be free, but I think it would be a fair trade if he helped us get some major progressive initiative through. I think the best bet is the carbon tax, where his proposal nominally is just that albeit badly implemented.

Why would he swap? If he loses half as badly as it looks like he might, then the Republican base is going to turn on him. They’ll blame his breaks with orthodoxy for his loss, they’ll say he wasn’t tough enough, they’ll form a nice circular firing squad. We should subtly facilitate that. Have his Democratic friends in the Senate tell him in private how they understood the base drove him to it, how they denied him his preferred veep pick, etc. Then, when the time comes, stroke his ego by including him in consultation. President Obama can show what a big guy he is by reaching out to his former rival.

Then, if he crusades like he did for McCain-Feingold, then we don’t get in the way of his next rising from the ashes. If he doesn’t, we bury him. Of course either way, first we beat the pants off him. After that, let’s channel our desire for revenge at the guys who committed the war crimes.

Our weird beautiful world

This came from one of my econ bloggers, but it was a week or so ago and I’m afraid I don’t remember who to hat tip.  Regardless click here for a collection of some of the strangest places and plants on Earth.

Does masculinity have a future?

Salon had an article on the what they call Guyland, "a kind of suspended animation between the dependency and lack of autonomy of boyhood and the sacrifice and responsibility of manhood" -- a phase that in recent years has expanded into many guys’ 30s." The author, Michael Kimmel, is worried about troubled disgruntled guys acting out. I’m not particularly worried about a tide of rising homophobia and such, considering that younger generations poll more tolerant, but it reminded me of Fight Club, which rather explicitly dealt alienation of men from modern consumerist society. There’s some vague spoilers in this about both Fight Club and the series Y the Last Man.

On the whole, I’d argue that Fight Club’s vision was fairly pessimistic. While violent, guys engaging in voluntary fights while keeping up with their every day life. Similarly the paramilitary group largely avoids targeting civilians and picks a relatively sympathetic goal in taking out the credit card records. But despite all that, the ending of the film hardly inspires any confidence is that movement. Even if consumerism takes a hit, it’s hard to see that vision of masculinity ever being compatible with the modern world.

Ironically, I’d argue the world of Y the Last Man, where men have almost been completely wiped out an instant, is more optimistic regarding the future of the male of the sepecies. As my friend Nic pointed out, many of the most prominent females take traditionally male roles such as crazed military commander, tough bodyguard, and unemotive scentist. The women of the world do go through a tough transition, but ultimately are able to get done everything that needs to be done. The absence of males do leave gaps in their lives, but ones they find creative ways to fill.

In short, again taking an idea from Nic, Y suggests that gender is becoming delinked from traditional masculinity. ’Assuming what’s good for the goose the gander then men should equally be able to adapt to a world in which there just isn’t as much demand for many traditional male roles. So, all in all, I’d argue the future with all the dead men perversely is the more hopeful one.

Saw a wild PUMA in the neighborhood today

I always kind of thought they were a myth. But there was actually someone with a Hillary Clinton sticker on their back window with 2012 written underneath it. They also wrote out the URL for a Party Unity My Ass website. Frakking weird.