Based on a letter I wrote this morning and plan to send this afternoon (once I look up the right address), from now on I’d like to be known as “‘Nobel Prize-nominated”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200503220009 blogger, Kieran Healy.’ I’m up for consideration in Physics. I nominated everyone here at CT as well, except “Montagu”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/author/montagu-norman/ because prizes aren’t awarded posthumously. There aren’t enough categories for us all to win in the same year (even counting “Economics”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Prize_categories), but I’m sure everyone’s turn will come.

Bloggers with more patience than me have been dealing with the tragic story of Terri Schiavo. “Lindsay Beyerstein”:http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2005/03/the_left_and_te.html has been “especially good”:http://www.alternet.org/story/21572. It’s clear that the Republican position on Schiavo is sheer grandstanding and hypocritical to boot. There’s plenty of evidence for this, what with President Bush’s signature on the “Texas Futile Care Law”:http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/schiavo_/2005/03/schiavo_futile_care_and_money.php and Bill Frist’s “statements about Christopher Reeve”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_atrios_archive.html#111169758487216228 and his support for “harvesting organs from anencephalic children”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_atrios_archive.html#111160342761631336. And never mind the broader policy context where the fiscal means whereby people might support patients in persistent vegetative states — via Medicare and bankruptcy protection — are being hacked away. Now, via “DC Media Girl”:http://dcmediagirl.com/index.php?entry=entry20050324-204119, we have the icing on the cake. Some “Fox News Pundit”:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,151442,00.html is thinking that Jeb Bush should just authorize a SWAT team to storm the hospice and get Terri Schiavo out:

bq. Just to burnish my reputation as a bomb thrower, I think Jeb Bush should give serious thought to storming the Bastille. By that I mean he should think about telling his cops to go over to Terri Schiavo’s (search) hospice, go inside, put her on a gurney and load her into an ambulance. They could take her to a hospital, revive her, and reattach her feeding tube. … So Jeb, call out the troops, storm the Bastille and tell ’em I sent you.

It’s our old friend, “poetic justice as fairness”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/07/17/poetic-justice-as-fairness/. Two words, buddy: “Elian Gonzalez”:http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/elian/.

While thinking about the “deterrent effect of the death penalty”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/24/deterrence-and-the-death-penalty/ I wondered about cross-national variation in rates of violent death. Comparative data on homicide rates undoubtedly exist, but I don’t have them to hand. I do have OECD data on rates of death due to assault, though, so here’s a nice picture of this trend for eighteen capitalist democracies from 1960 to 2002.

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I’m woefully ignorant about the geopolitics of Asia, so I’m not going to offer any opinions of my own here. Harry at “Harry’s Place has been linking”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/03/24/the_eus_military_industrial_complex.php to “a piece in the Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1444660,00.html which expresses relief at the EU’s decision to postpone the lifting of the arms embargo on China. In Garton Ash’s piece, China is cast as the bad guy. A different view is put in “a fascinating article by Chalmers Johnson”:http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2259 which sees American concern about democracy as being merely window-dressing for a policy which is basically about preventing the emergence of geopolitical rivals. Johnson also warns about US encouragement for the remilitarization of Japan as a counterweight to China.

In yesterday’s debate on the proposed program to send CIA analysts back to campus, Martin Kramer writes:

If there’s a danger here, it’s the possibility of faculty intimidation of students. The storm at Columbia is a precedent, and if it’s known who’s made a prior commitment to intelligence work, there’s a real possibility that radical professors might target students. I wouldn’t accept anyone’s assurance that this won’t happen. So- called “transparency” sets up students for a radical witch-hunt, which will seek to gut the program by “outing” its participants. (I don’t even think the NSEP scholars should be named. I’ve seen the list, with the foreign countries where they have studied. It’s beyond me why an NSEP student who’s gone to study Arabic in Syria — a police state — should be openly named as a prospective employee of a national security agency.)

I’ll grant him the risk of NSEP students being exposed when they go to study abroad, but Kramer’s scorn for “so-called transparency,” and for exercises in “outing,” which set people up for a “witch-hunt,” seems rather hard to reconcile with his support for Campus Watch and for the David Project at Columbia. Campus Watch not only seeks to highlight possible discrimination against students, but also to highlight statements (or, very often what students claim are statements) made by Middle East studies professors, which are anti-Israel, anti-US, which make excuses for autocracies in the Arab world, etc etc. The David Project makes similar accusations against professors in Columbia’s MEALAC program – but doesn’t seem, according to the accounts I’ve read, to have much in the way of hard evidence to back them up. I don’t think that it’s much of a stretch at all to describe both of these endeavours as “outing,” or to point to the likelihood that they will indeed lead to radical witch hunts (looking to aggrieved students for ‘evidence’ of bias in the classroom is liable to produce distortions and downright falsehoods that can do irreparable damage to innocent professors’ reputations). The “storm in Columbia” is indeed a precedent – but not necessarily in the sense that Kramer intends. As noted yesterday, I’ve more respect for Kramer than for some of the others in his camp – but if, as he seems to be suggesting, he’s actively opposed to ‘so-called transparency,’ witch hunts and outing, he should extend the lesson to those forms of transparency and outing that he supports, as well as those that he dislikes.

Apologies for yet another meta post. How many sets of teeth can one site have, anyway? I’d really appreciate some help, though.

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As CT’s resident Rousseauiste, I’d like to pass on the news to residents of New York City (and parts thereabouts) that the Johnson Theater will be staging the “first ever US production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s play Narcisse”:http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/narcisse.htm from 7-10 April:

bq. an utterly contemporary drama that deals with the problem of narcissism and sexual ambiguity. The play is about a man who falls in love with an image of himself dressed as a woman and explores contemporary issues of desire, self-obsession and the difficulty of the relation between the sexes.

Enjoy!

Eugene Volokh “quotes extensively”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_03_20-2005_03_26.shtml#1111616457 from a new paper by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule that presents an “argument for the death penalty”:http://aei-brookings.org/publications/abstract.php?pid=922. It begins by reviewing recent studies that find the death penalty has a deterrent effect on potential murderers. In particular:

bq. Disaggregating the data on a state by state basis, Joanna Shepherd finds that the nation-wide deterrent effect of capital punishment is entirely driven by only six states … [The states] showing a deterrent effect are executing more people than states that do not. In fact the data show a “threshold effect”: deterrence is found in states that had at least nine executions between 1977 and 1996. In states below that threshold, no deterrence can be found. This finding is intuitively plausible. Unless executions reach a certain level, murderers may act as if the death is so improbable as not to be worthy of concern. Her main lesson is that once the level of executions reaches a certain level, the deterrent effect of capital punishment is substantial.

This is an elegant idea, but trouble with it is that only few states execute anyone in a given year. Most execute no-one. A tiny few — notably Texas — kill a lot of people in some years. As a result, evidence for a threshold deterrent effect depends on a very small number of observations. In a “nice analysis”:http://preprints.stat.ucla.edu/396/JELS.pap.pdf of state-level data from 1977 to 1997, “Richard Berk”:http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~berk/ shows that just eleven state-year observations out of a thousand drive the deterrent effect. It’s possible to mess around with the specification a bit to get a less strongly skewed measure (by standardizing the number of executions by the number of death sentences, say) or making the data more fine-grained so that you have more observations (using county-quarters as a unit, for instance), but in the end its hard to escape the worry that about 1 percent of the observations are behind the results.

We’re probably witnessing the birth of a dubious stylized fact about deterrence and the death penalty. I don’t doubt that the Sunstein and Vermeule paper raises a bunch of interesting questions, but the empirical results they rely on just don’t seem that robust. This is a bit ironic given their argument that “The widespread failure to appreciate the life-life tradeoffs involved in capital punishment may depend on cognitive processes that fail to treat ‘statistical lives’ with the seriousness that they deserve.” One of these processes is the tendency to latch on to a cool finding a bit too quickly. Negative results (like the ones reported in Berk’s paper) are just not as interesting, unfortunately.

Like Sisyphus in Camus’ essay, I have come to the conclusion that myself and Tim Lambert only get involved in tackling the neverending wave of idiots who suddenly believe themselves to be statistical savants when reading[1] the Lancet study, because of the pleasure we get when from time to time they stop. This isn’t one of those times.

I think that Patient Zero of the current outbreak is the appalling Reynolds, who has apparently learned statistics over the last year (or at least, I distinctly remember him claiming to be “unable to say” whether John Lott was a hack or not, but here he is, talking stats with the best of them[2]). But for sheer asininity and bombast, you can’t beat Shannon Love (you may remember him as the architect of the “cluster sampling critique”, and if you don’t know what that is, good luck for you), who appears to be claiming that the Lancet team told lies on purpose in order to create propaganda for the Ba’ath party. As Tim says, this would be libellous if it were not so obviously stupid. Mr Love has decided to up the ante and “fisk” the whole report. I’m afraid that I was rather rude to him in his comments thread.

The arbiters of American journalistic standards are on our side now, so I suspect that we are fucked.

[1] I jest, of course. “Reading the study”! I crack me up.
[2] The best of them, to be honest, is still pretty bad.

I’ve been reading Todd Zywicki’s paper An Economic Analysis Of The Consumer Bankruptcy Crisis (1Mb PDF). Zywicki’s approach is to look at aggregate time-series data on a set of suggested causes of rising bankruptcy, suggest that the pattern for these time-series doesn’t match the observed increase in bankruptcy, The main point is, as he says,

Static or declining variables, such as unemployment, divorce, or health care costs, cannot explain a variable that is increasing in value, such as bankruptcy filing rates.

Hence, he says, the ‘traditional model’ of bankruptcy as a “last resort” outcome of financial distress is no longer valid. He therefore falls back on the residual hypothesis of changes in consumer behavior in the form of an increased willingness to resort to bankruptcy, possibly due to the rise of impersonal modes of lending and the decline of moral sanctions. Zywicki doesn’t mention the other obvious residual possibility: an exogenous increase in willingness to lend to high-risk borrowers, but symmetry suggests he ought to.

I don’t think Zywicki’s is the ideal research strategy (see below) but it has the advantage that anyone can play, armed only with Google. So let me point to a variable that has risen in the right way and could reasonably be expected to lead to rising rates of bankruptcy. That variable is the volatility of individual income, or, in simpler terms, the economic risk faced by the average person.

What this means is that the bankruptcy ‘crisis’ is an outcome of the general changes in the US economy over the past 30 years or so. If it weren’t for expanded credit and increased reliance on bankruptcy, the distress caused by growing inequality and income volatility would have been substantially greater. If bankruptcy laws are tightened, distress will increase. To put it simply, bankruptcy is the lesser of two evils.

I’m not getting continuations to work. There’s a full version at my blog.

Any maiden aunts who read CT possibly ought to skip this post, as it contains, in the interests of plain speaking on an issue where squeamishness might cost lives, one use of the “v-word“. I’m back on an old pedantic hobby-horse; the epidemiology of MRSA and the British political culture’s dangerous and annoying refusal to understand it properly. But this time, I have an actual policy suggestion.
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Via MyDD:

TALLAHASSEE: Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities…

While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.”

The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views.

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.

Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.

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I have no idea why people whose judgement I usually regard as sound consider Kevin MacNamara’s remarks to be in any way uncalled-for. As far as I can see, the Conservative Party’s new policy on gypsies is utterly odious; the Conservative Party themselves are not particularly similar to the Nazis, but their policy on Gypsy camps is sufficiently similar to be worthy of the analogy. Michael Howard (who created this problem in the first place by removing the obligation on local authorities to provide sites for Gypsies) has said, in public, that he intends to repeal or alter the “so-called” Human Rights Act in order to deprive Gypsies of their right to due legal process in challenging refusals to give planning consent for campsites on land that they have bought. This is scandalous. The Human Rights Act, among other things, guarantees due process for anyone who finds themselves having legal restrictions placed on their ability to do what they want with their property, or to have a home for themselves and their families in a community of their choice. In matters of planning disputes, Gypsies have rather more need for judicial review than most of us, because local authorities tend to racially discriminate against them. But what Michael Howard is saying is that he will alter the law so as to have the effect of removing this protection from Gypsies, because he wants non-Gypsies to be able to prevent Gypsies from living near them and regards this as more important than the public
policy issue.
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Kevin Drum recently wrote about the danger of the unceasing partisan war against the media:

If this continues, the eventual result will be an almost universal ability to ignore any news report you don’t like simply by claiming it’s the result of bias and therefore not to be trusted. This is unhealthy.

I’ve been noticing this for a while. It used to be limited to blog comment threads, more or less, but it’s been creeping up the food chain. Look at the way that popular right-wing bloggers talk about Seymour Hersh, for example. Nobel Prize-nominated blogger Tom Maguire from Just One Minute is one of the most intelligent, careful right-wing bloggers, but he’s not immune to it. See this uncharacteristic post.

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