Liberal Scrappers

On the David Sirota radio show this morning, he and a few of his leftist callers were voicing support for scrapping the health reform bill and starting over. Because apparently doing that would change the composition and rules of the Senate. It distresses me to always hear such institutional ignorance from liberals.

I’ll go even further. To favor scrapping the bill because it isn’t good enough is just as sociopathic as Lieberman’s holding the bill hostage over the public option. It would have the same result of not covering more people and thus allowing more to die.

Lieberman has the advantage of actually making a difference. Liberals can doom a bill without being sufficient to pass it. Lieberman can doom it or pass it. That means his threats are credible. So liberals, remember while you are railing against Lieberman that if you couple it with opposition to whatever bill can pass (and mark at least a marginal improvement), you are no better than he is.

Is Twilight Racist?

Can we just stop with the feminist analyses of the Twilight series? Please?

However, I was not prepared for the way the movie portrays physical relationship violence, particularly in Native communities. For all the talk of Edward’s abusiveness throughout feminist blogworld, I’ve seen much less written about domestic violence as it relates to the film’s competing love interest, Jacob Black — a 16-year-old Quileute boy who can turn into a werewolf.
[...]
After breakfast, once Jacob and Bella are alone in the car, Jacob explains that Emily’s soon-to-be husband lost his temper “for a split second,” became a werewolf, and mauled her. (Earlier in the film, he has told Bella that this whole turning-into-a-werewolf-when-you-get-angry thing is actually a genetic trait carried by many men in his community.) He explains that he’s worried that he’s bad for Bella because he doesn’t know if he can control his own anger.

It’s more than a little problematic for New Moon to portray violence as an endemic trait among Native men. Yes, domestic violence is a very real problem in American Indian communities. According to Sacred Circle, Native women are more likely to experience violence than any other U.S. population. A full 64 percent of American Indian women will be physically assaulted in their lifetime. They are also stalked at more than twice the rate of other women. But to imply that this is a result of Native people’s genes rather than related to other issues such as drug and alcohol abuse, or centuries of racism and marginalization, is inexcusable.

Yes, because it would work to have the werewolves be mild-mannered and entirely behaved. I can’t say that the werewolf-native population-domestic abuse angle crossed my mind while reading the books (the teen dating violence did, though I think it is more critical than approving of the violence…it is aware of it). That native american populations have higher rates make the book richer and more interesting because it adds commentary on that problem.

Basically what Ann sets up here is a catch-22 where either you are racist because you associate domestic violence with natives, or you are sexist because you fail to note the high incidence of domestic violence in native communities and are turning a blind eye to it. She makes a big fuss out of the genetic link, but that the werewolf trait is genetic is essential to the story. It couldn’t be written as being caused by alcohol abuse because that would be insanely stupid. Just because Twilight can be overanalyzed to say horrible anti-feminist or racist things does not mean it is those things, but then I guess that is just my third order intolerance again.

We forget that the plot honors this native tribe as the protector of humanity in this area. It treats them as an unassailable force of good, if with a few flaws. This is not a book series that denigrates native populations in the least. It seems to celebrate them while acknowledging some darker elements. So while Ann reads this and finds yet another reason to be horrified by the whole thing, her critique has actually strengthened my appreciation for the series.

Yes, the series is based around some traditional concepts that feminists loath such as abstinence until marriage and anti-abortion. But there is nothing abhorrent in theory with either of those positions. It is not a book series that supports retrograde gender roles. Bella’s mom is a very independent woman and a bit of a firecracker and it never judges her parents for their divorce. The relationship between Carlile and Esme is one of equals (though following gender norms in that he works and she is more of the emotional heart of the family). None of the other relationships are distinctly male dominant either. Even Bella and Edward’s relationship is largely about her persistence in the face of his hesitations to get what SHE wants. It isn’t about women centering their life around men but people centering their lives around those they love. After all, it is Edward that has the most overt display of not finding life worth living without Bella, not the other way around.

This is something that irritates me about social liberals generally, a philosophy common among feminists. They don’t understand the value that can come from traditional views of relationships. The associate it with the truly bad things that are found among social conservatives. But at the end of the day, there is a lot to be said about two people being deeply committed to each other, and about making sacrifices to keep a family together. Perhaps monogamy is not perfectly attainable in humanity, but that isn’t a reason to completely discard all traditional values.

Sacrificing Science At The Alter Of Contrarianism

Steven Levitt responds to criticism of the walking while drunk section I blogged about yesterday…and I am rather unsatisfied. He is just too quick to let the impact of what he says slide off:

Obviously, I’ve left out all sorts of other costs and benefits in this simple analysis that could tip the balance one way or another, but I suspect most people will be surprised to see how close it is to a toss-up.

This is way too casual a way to dismiss concerns. “Sure, I may have cut corners that grossly exaggerated my conclusion, but you know, if I did it properly it might be close enough to surprise people.” Or it might not be close at all and confirm the conventional wisdom that walking is much safer than driving (drunk or otherwise). You don’t get to upend the intuitive understanding with shoddy statistics. It sickens me how committed Levitt has become to his counterfactual finding…it is contrary to the very nature of the scientific method, and even freakonomists are supposed to care about that.

Is Women’s Health Under Attack?

This from Miriam at Feministing seems a bit misguided:

It’s been a double whammy for preventative screenings and women’s health lately. We got news of the new mammogram recommendations a few weeks ago and then the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology came out with new recommendations about the frequency of pap smears.

Sorry, but these cancer screening recommendation changes are not an assault on women’s health. They aren’t even based on a decision that it isn’t worth the money to screen younger or more often. The changes were based on scientific evidence that overtesting was doing physical harm to women. What you gain in increased detection of cancer you lose in even greater increases in misdirection leading to unnecesssary and dangerous follow-up treatment. It seems like there has become a cultish environment constructed around these screenings as pure good without considering drawbacks that lead to a very territorial behavior. I’m not sure you see this with prostate cancer screening, which has been battered even more by concerns about overtreatment. This is perhaps because of male stubbornness about health care (which does not benefit us on the whole) or perhaps because the screening is more likely to be joked about than glorified.

That said, she has a pretty good point here:

Secondly, I still think women should see their provider every year, for physicals but also to do routine STI testing, birth control exams and other health needs. Will a woman go to the doctor if she doesn’t feel pressure to get a pap? I think all of us would benefit from regular doctor’s visits (including men and folks of all genders).

Perhaps it is true that lacking the incentive of getting a pap smear, women will be less diligent about visiting the doctor and thus fail to get other preventive care. To the degree that this phenomenon occurs, it could overwhelm the overtreatment concerns and make the screening worthwhile. Of course, it would be even better to find another way to get them in consistently than unnecessary screening.

WaPo What You Say

Little did I know, until I read this from John Cole, that Ezra Klein is facing a bit of heat from a member of the WaPo editorial board for alleging, essentially, that Joe Lieberman is opposing health reform out of political spite, and that dooming health reform to failure would cause hundreds of thousands of people to die who wouldn’t otherwise. The latter is certainly true, and the former seems likely (and really, why someone supports a policy that would cause hundreds of thousands of deaths seems somewhat irrelevant).

Who knows how serious the threat to Klein’s position with WaPo is, but it would certainly be unfortunate but all to typical of a media institution that is largely worthless with the exception of Klein. Given my frequent links to Klein’s blog and his inclusion in my blogroll, you can tell that I’m a supporter.

I’ve been saying mean things about Joe Lieberman for a number of years now, but I guess I, unlike Ezra, have the advantage of an anonymous, hobbyist blog where I don’t face professional ramifications. Hopefully WaPo will avoid disgrace and this will go down as simply a dispute of tact.

Assuming Equality

The chapter in Superfreakonomics on prostitution digresses a bit into wage gaps and includes this sentence that would make most feminists shudder:

Could it be that men have a weakness for money just as women have a weakness for children?

A year ago I posted this graph that shows the bulk of the wage gap exists in more traditional men and women. Those are probably the men who might be most money obsessed and the women who might be most children obsessed. In this case there are probably more men than women who are money obsessed and more women than men who are baby obsessed, making it look like men are different from women, but really could be a matter of different skews.

Wage gaps are almost impossible to measure properly because it is hard to compare the relative values of different forms of experience. While there are some studies showing degrees of direct wage discrimination based on sex (including involving transsexuals), I do think a significant portion of the wage gap is captured in other factors that are not necessarily problematic.

There is the habit in much feminist critique to assume that equality would be the default state were there no gender discrimination. Basically you see this in the form of critiques based on stats showing there are more men in politics, more men in boardrooms, more men in math and sciences and in a similar way, stats that show that women make less than men on average. It is the assumption of equality. However, I have found many feminists quick to disregard those who mention concern about the fact that women now make up about 60% of higher education students (and an even greater percentage of graduates). Apparently this is to say that because we live in a patriarchy, only variations from equality that hurt the “minority” are proof of discrimination.

I think one factor in the disproportionality of higher education is that males have better job prospects without a college degree than women do (due to the physical nature of many of those jobs). So there can be a rational decision for men to avoid college, though it becomes less rational each year as the education wage gap increases.

Boys do seem to struggle in K-12 disproportionately and have more behavioral concerns and ultimately men are much more likely to enter into the criminal justice system. I’m not exactly sure where this disproportionality comes from, but it certainly seems that there is a biological difference (on average) that leads males toward greater levels of crime, particularly violent crime. I think it would be just as bad to assume gender discrimination is to blame for these discrepancies as to assume it, and not natural variation, may be to blame for those that seem to short-change women. It is important to investigate these inequalities, but hazardous to assume they prove something.

Note: The beginning of this post was clipped out of the Superfreakonomics post as I decided it merited its own post to expand more fully.

Superfreakonomics: Prostitution

Contrary to the section on drunk walking that takes up only a couple pages, the chapter mostly dealing with prostitution in Chicago’s south side is very interesting. It does perhaps not speak sufficiently to the miseries of the profession (it acknowledges it but largely moves over it quickly).

Particularly interesting is the suggestion that the women’s movement that largely removed the social stigma of premarital (and even casual) sex as part of giving women power in the sexual arena has reduced the demand for prostitution as men can find sex for free. I do think looking at prostitution economically rather than morally is important because sex is a fairly fundamental need and where needs go unfulfilled there will be excess demand, which usually attracts a supplier. Considering we may have hit a point where there is not much ground to be gained in encouraging women to be more promiscuous (and it is of dubious morality to do so) thus satisfying the demand on the free market. If porn and strip clubs are insufficient substitutes for sex, prostitution will remain.

In light of some of the more relevant aspects of When Brute Force Fails, in absence of the ability to eliminate drug dealing, or in this case prostitution, a transactional crime, emphasis in enforcement can turn to those varieties of prostitution that create the most related violent or property crime so that less harmful versions have an advantage.

One thing of note is that to a certain degree, economics makes us all prostitutes. Most women may not charge for sex, but it is still valuable, and you better believe they are getting something of value for it. If any given incident of sex did not offer utility (at least as perceived at the time), it would not happen (obviously excluding rape which is not a decision for the victim). Whether a hook-up at a bar or a long-term boyfriend, something the male provides is of value to her (this true for any pairing, I don’t mean to be hetero-normative but that is the most relevant to the prostitution debate). Prohibition of prostitution is a way of society (rather than a woman) saying that one kind of value is acceptable and another is not. Like with drugs, even where legalization is perhaps not ideal, some manner of organized indifference may be socially optimal.

Update: Just to follow up on the general statistical aspect, this chapter is more soundly based certainly than the walking drunk and more importantly, does not seem to overreach the data. This is perhaps the key for social sciences for me, being intellectually honest to what you actually have rather than trying to pretend to have something groundbreaking. Alas, the incentives often favor the latter. Still, it would have been interesting to contrast the main dataset out of Chicago with something from the legal prostitution in Las Vegas or elsewhere. To completely ignore legal prostitution seems hard to explain.

Making Compensation Visible

When people ask you what your income is, you usually respond with your salary/wages. The gross amount on your paycheck prior to taking out income taxes and payroll taxes. But depending on where you work, this is only part of the story. There is a lot of economic research that basically says when a company spends money on health care, on 401(k) matches or on any number of other employee benefits, that is a substitute for wages. Thus it is important to include that in compensation calculations and also important as an individual to think about whether non-wage compensation provides as much utility as that money would do as wages.

In my own case, total compensation is about 133% of my salary, with the addition mostly in the form of health insurance, 401(k) match, and the employer part of FICA taxes. In this case FICA is unavoidable (and social security and Medicare are generally speaking, very good uses of compensation in a broader perspective). The 401(k) match is optional, but not something I could take as wages. This, I imagine, is because my employer gets a tax benefit for offering the match so taxpayers generally bear the burden of incentivizing me to save for retirement. Even if I could get a portion of this in wages, it is probably best, again in the broader perspective, to take this compensation as retirement savings rather than wages.

Then we get to health care, and this is the relevant one. I happen to know exactly what my company is paying for health insurance. Indeed, since I can choose to take it as wages instead of enrolling in a group plan (and perhaps go enroll in a cheaper plan, especially given my relative youth) I do have the incentive to be a discerning consumer of health care.

There is good evidence that expensive health insurance plans do not necessarily produce better outcomes, so taking more compensation in that area rather than as wages is not necessarily productive. It is also common for the employee not to be given such a clear indication of the cost of health insurance to an employer, nor the option to take it as wages and shop around. Many employees don’t have a choice of insurers…they either accept what their work offers or receive no benefit whatsoever. This makes them rather less involved in cost consciousness. By not seeing the cost of health insurance and not getting any clear wage benefit for reducing that cost, they don’t have any direct incentive.

This is what the Senate health bill’s excise tax on expensive plans is meant to do, further push plan costs down over time by making the plans more efficient. This will bend the cost curve for health insurance, but it will also increase worker wages, compared to if the tax isn’t included.

In my case, my distrust of the individual market (and a few preexisting conditions) makes me settle for the cheapest group option provided through my employer, but the way they handle insurance makes me think about it a lot more than I might at most other employers. If we get reasonable health insurance reform and I am permitted to enter into the exchange, it is quite possible that I can find a plan that suits me even better.

This of course is the beauty of the Wyden Choice Amendment to expand the exchanges. The combination of a healthy exchange and more employers switching to this model of defined contribution that can be used for wages or premiums (and expanded use of HSAs) could really do a lot to make health insurance costs more explicit and raise political support for even stronger cost control measures. Only when people see their personal interest in reducing health care spending will they overcome the fear-based attacks.

P.S. If I endorsed using tax as a curse word, as libertarians are particularly fond of, I would frame cost controls as a payroll tax cut funded by eliminating medical waste, and thus Republicans who oppose cost controls as supporting a tax increase on the poor and middle class. But I don’t support anti-tax hysteria.

Superfreakonomics: The Dangers of WUI

In my first of what I imagine will be multiple posts related to Superfreakonomics, I’d like to tackle one of the first things they talk about, ever so briefly; that walking drunk could be riskier than driving drunk, per mile. This is true, they claim, in terms of personal risk of death and, to a lesser degree, of anyone dying.

The most glaring flaw in this argument is the assumption that an equal proportion of miles walked are walked drunk (an unmeasured quantity) as miles driven are driven drunk (something they have an estimate of). I see no reason to feel this is a safe assumption. The proportion could be lower (which would strengthen their argument) or higher (which would weaken it). I would actually put my money on higher at least based on personal experience.

A few other things also make me uneasy about this claim. In many situations, your decision is not walking versus driving. Walking would seem to be considered for short trips and driving for longer trips. Thus, even if per-mile you have higher risk with walking, given you are driving further than you are walking, this could shift the risk back towards driving.

Next, working in injury prevention, I know there is far more to consider than deaths. While there are 13,000 alcohol-related traffic deaths, there are countless more injuries of varying severity not to mention property damage. Beyond the 1,000 drunk walkers who are killed (by cars), we shouldn’t really expect nearly as many injuries or property damage proportionately. It is extremely odd for an economist to focus on deaths and not broader economic tolls. I think this factor would certainly put the cost of driving drunk higher than walking drunk (not even including the higher individual cost of being convicted of a DWI).

Finally, I think as a social economic calculation (though not an individual cost/benefit analysis), the actor’s life should be considered less valuable than other lives because they are the one making the decision that puts it at risk. Thus from a social perspective, even if drunk walking had a higher risk to the walker, it would still be preferable to driving because of the complete removal of risk to others.

Listen, I encourage counter-intuitive speculation, but in wrapping up the discussion, Levitt and Dubner do not even remotely try to qualify their statement:

So as you leave your friend’s party, the decision should be clear: driving is safer than walking.

Sure, they say you could call a cab or drink less, but they do not contemplate that even on this direct comparison they are wrong, even though their basis for the claim is flimsy at best. It is dangerous to speculate and call it fact and allow people to make potentially deadly decisions based on that speculation. And it is this irresponsibility and casualness that I think has rightly earned Superfreakonomics a lot of criticism.

Treating Guns Like Cars

The book When Brute Force Fails, about moving toward more efficient crime-control measures has a section on gun control that had me thinking.

Guns are a lot like cars. Many people have them and find them very useful, but there are some people who use them irresponsibly and so we seek to prevent them access, though enforcement is difficult. Sure, guns have additional Constitutional protections (in a strict interpretation, individual ownership is probably not granted, but I accept the dynamic interpretation of DC v Heller that provides such a right) but it doesn’t seem that this makes guns beyond regulation.

With cars, we do not allow children to drive, we ease teens into driving, and we revoke licenses for those who through various violations (drunk or careless driving). We require people to register their cars largely to assist in enforcement (of auto theft if nothing else). People can (illegally) drive without a license or registration, which is a danger, but the records allow for swift punishment if they are caught on even a minor offense.

There is no reason to think a similar strategy wouldn’t help our difficulties in enforcing current gun laws. If we licensed people for gun ownership and registered guns it would be relatively easier to prevent guns from ending up in the hands of those we don’t want them in (those with criminal record or mental illness). The registration process would allow ownership restrictions to apply to private sales as well (because the new owner would need to register the gun) and trace the gun back to the last legal owner to at least see how it fell into the wrong hands. It would make gun possession an easier crime to sort out. You could even require the gun license to purchase ammunition, a place where it seems not enough attention is paid (aside from Chris Rock’s bit on taxing bullets so people would have to think twice before using one).

The point is that the vast majority of gun owners do not misuse them, this is especially of true of those who are most officially recognized (concealed carry permits). The NRA stokes fear that licensing or registration is a step towards confiscation, but paranoia is not a good basis for policy making. Taking this step would actually do more to protect the legal owners but helping target enforcement at the violators, making it less necessary to impose broader acting gun control.