Obstructionism

Sometimes, people without their own ideas will pretend to have them in order to force those with ideas to address their figments and thereby delay any meaningful action. They create a false controversy by putting forth "alternatives" that exist only in opposition to the ideas of others, and then they complain loudly if a decision process moves on without them, claiming that the issue isn't settled yet.

I've encountered this recently in my professional life, and we see it in politics all the time. We saw it in the run-up to the Iraq war: France and Germany suddenly developed strong opinions about the use of sanctions and of force in Iraq when they had been perfectly happy letting their American and British allies enforce international law and police no-fly zones for them for a decade.

We're seeing it now in the U.S. Congress, where Republicans are opposing health care reform.

Congressional Republicans say the Senate bill was "rushed" through. Bullshit. The votes were held in the early morning -- with a week's public notice, so don't pretend this was snuck by -- because of Republican parliamentary maneuvers. And this process has been going on for a full year. Anyone who doesn't know by now what the issues on the table are hasn't been paying attention.

As a refresher: The process began with the president taking off that table something that the Democratic base dearly loves: single-payer health care. Then he put on the table something that Republicans love: malpractice litigation reform. Republicans ignored these concessions, but that doesn't mean the Left got its way. Today, any government-run system of any stripe is dead in the water and the Senate and House bills both contains vigorous anti-abortion language. Republicans should be happy about these compromises.

Instead, congressional Republicans say the process didn't include their ideas. Bullshit. Yes, it's true that some Republicans put forth some ideas for how to reform our system. Some of these ideas, like giving the same tax break to individuals purchasing insurance that employers get, were good ones. Here's the rub: not many of their fellow Republicans actually backed these bills.

Its not like these people have no access to the media. If there were a comprehensive bill, with the support of the majority of the Republican caucus, and the Democratic leadership refused to take it up, do you think that might make the news? But we haven't heard that story, have we?

Republicans, my friends: You had six years in charge of both the White House and the Congress. For another six year before that, you had the Congress, and the White House was held by a Democrat who was extremely interested in health care reform. You did nothing. Today, someone else is doing the job for you, and suddenly you're full of innovation and righteous indignation. Give me a break.

Merry Christmas, Cherpumple

I can't speak for all of you up there in the snow-ravaged north, but around these parts, all the news is of the cherpumple monster pie cake. Says creator Charles Phoenix, "The Cherpumple is the desert version of the Turducken."

Me, I've never been a big one for cherry pie, and I've always felt that white cake is a waste of everyone's time. Chocopumple, anyone?

Oh Captain, My Captain

Disney has announced that "Captain Eo" will be returning to Disneyland starting in February. Is it wrong for me to be so excited about that?

Who gets a seat at the climate change table?

Representatives of developing countries at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen are upset: they say that developed countries aren't addressing their concerns.

Folks, I appreciate your situation. But let me be cruelly blunt. Why are we having international conversations about this in the first place? Because addressing climate change could be expensive, and no one wants to blink first. No country wants to put in place rules stricter than those of its neighbors out of fear that businesses and their investment will relocate to those neighbors. To the people in small developing countries: you are not competing in this staring contest.

The players are:

1. Countries that emit a lot of greenhouse gases
2. Countries rich enough to do something about the gases emitted by (1)
3. Countries to which the businesses from (1) might relocate if regulations were tightened
4. To the extent that a cap+trade+offsets scheme plays a role in any compromise, countries with a lot of offsets to offer

In other words, if you're part of the problem, or you're rich enough to pay for the solution, or you have something critical to sell to either of them, you necessarily get a seat at the table. If you're a victim, and have no ability to stop being so, you don't.

So who are these players?

1. China, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil.
2. The "G7": the United States, Japan, China, Germany, France, the UK, and Italy. (I'm looking at total GDP here; Luxembourg and Qatar may have higher GDP per capita, but they have so few capita that they're not prepared to be a big part of the solution to this problem.)
3. The G7, China, and India.
4. Indonesia and Brazil. (The link on (1) above applies here too.)

I'm going to coin a term here and call the above countries the "Climate 11" or "C11." (It has more syllables than I would like, although the rhyme between "G7" and "C11" is nice. Perhaps it will catch on. Tell your friends!)

If you want to get people riled up about an issue, holding a UN conference and making a big show about "we're all coming together" is a good way to do it, provided you can back it (which is in no way assured in this case). But make no mistake: any solution will be negotiated among the C11 and might just as well take place in Washington or Brasília as in Copenhagen. Everyone else, though they may suffer greatly from the effects of climate change through no fault of their own, come as beggars to this table.

Sexual Harrassment and How to Avoid It

It's that time of year again (at least at my company): the time when all managers have to go through training on how to avoid and address sexual harassment in the workplace. A friend pointed me to these handy tips, which if universally followed would go a long way towards addressing this problem. This one is my favorite:

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

Getting Our Priorities Straight

A good friend just sent me a link to Aaron Swartz's blog. It's really good; I'll be following it.

This post is a response to Aaron's post Keynes, Explained Briefly, an endorsement of the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes. (For some reason, this is my second heavy post on economics in a row. Sorry, folks.)

Here's Aaron's summary of Keynes:

So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that’s kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs.

But, starting in the 1970s, the rich staged a counterattack. They didn’t like watching inequality — and their wealth — melt away. There was a resurgence in classical economics, Keynes was declared to have been debunked, and interest rates were raised drastically, throwing millions out of work. The economy tanked, inequality soared, and things have never been the same since. For a while people talked about levels of inequality that hadn’t been seen since the 1920s. Then they talked about a recession the size of which hadn’t been seen since the 1930s.

We could easily fact-check the above by looking at average economic growth in different decades and evaluating them based on analyses of which policies were more or less "Keynesian." We could do the same for other countries as well. But instead, I'd like to take this idea off on my own tangent. Here's what came to my mind when I read the above paragraphs:

For the sake of argument, let's assume that Keynesian economic theory is the best, most definitive economic theory, beyond dispute.

The economic benefits of applying the model come at a political cost. The problem is that for it to work, you have to give the people who make all the rules, and have the power to enforce them, an additional power: to take your money away. Then you have to trust them to only do so when it's in the long-term interest of you and your community. (If I were a Libertarian, which I'm not, this would be my opportunity to say something glib.)

Such a system may indeed produce great results when it works. But it's not fault tolerant. When you don't have well-meaning, competent, accountable leaders -- when you've given enormous power to the corrupt and/or incompetent and/or unaccountable -- the failure mode is dictatorship and atrocity.

Let's take a historical example. Europeans have generally made a Keynesian economic bargain: give the government great power, and trust good leadership and the parliamentary process to keep that power directed toward Good, not Evil. For the most part, the results have been good: Europe is full of prosperous, developed countries and prosperous, happy people. But every once in a while, a dictator comes to power, shuts down the newspapers, and kills a lot of people.

At this point in my first draft of this post, I tried to count genocides, mass killings, and ethnic cleansings in Europe in the last century. I got a little bogged down: is the Armenian genocide "European"? Sure, there's Bosnia. But do mass killings of Jews, Roma, Yugoslavians, gays, dissidents, etc. in the 30's and 40's constitute multiple incidents or just one? Moscow is in Europe, but the Russians never had a democratic government to begin with; do the Purges count? Let's just sum up by saying: bad people have done a lot of bad things. During the same period, there has been nothing at all similar in North America.

On the other hand, the number of massive global economic slumps caused by the United States in the last 100 years: two. Number caused by anyone across the Pond: none.

So what's your poison?