"Deceit"

The New Adventures

By Peter Darvill-Evans
April 1993
Virgin Publishing

"Take Arcadia apart if you have to."

The middle of the twenty-fifth century. The Dalek war is drawing to an untidy close. Earth's Office of External Operations is trying to extend its influence over the corporations that have controlled human-occupied space since man first ventured to the stars. 

Agent Isabelle Defries is leading one expedition. Among her barely-controllable squad is an explosives expert who calls herself Ace. Their destination: Arcadia. 

A non-technological paradise? A living laboratory for a centuries-long experiment? Fuel for a super-being? Even when Ace and Benny discover the truth, the Doctor refuses to listen to them. 

Nothing is what it seems to be. 

At the time this book was published, Peter Darvill-Evans was pretty much in charge of the New Adventures. As I understand the history, he was the driving force behind the creation of the NAs in the first place, and he had spent the last two years shepherding them into existence. And by any measure, he was impressively successful. It's easy to forget, or just not to notice, how daring the NAs were. No one had ever done an ongoing series of original "Doctor Who" novels before, and these weren't just your typical TV tie-in merchandise. These books were intended to continue the development of the series in print. And they were successful enough to go from one-every-two-months to one-a-month.

In the afterword to this book, Darvill-Evans explains that he wanted to subject himself to the same strict rules he imposed on other writers, partly as a learning experience, to get a better sense of how those rules operated. He also wanted to tie together concepts from several previous books to create the baseline for a future history of Earth. And, of course, there was the small matter of reintroducing Ace. In addition to all of that, the book also has its own story to tell (which is why it is so obvious even by sight that "Deceit" is the longest NA yet).

The story is the weakest and least memorable aspect of the book, in my view. It has interesting elements here and there, but there's a lot of mess to get through along the way. It's extremely slow to develop, and looking back on it, not much really happens. The Doctor, Benny, and Ace all make their way by various routes, with various supporting characters in tow, to the confrontation. It's drearily linear, and it's lacking in suspense and excitement. It doesn't help matters that the villain's plan is shown to have been ill-conceived from the start.

So let's focus on New Ace. She's responsible for carrying a large chunk of the story, including pretty much all of the violent action stuff, and that seems to be her role now. She's been away from the TARDIS for three years now, and she's spent that time as a soldier in Spacefleet. One novel is not a lot to go on, but New Ace seems both shallower and narrower than before, which seems a real shame. On the other hand, it makes for a very new dynamic on board the TARDIS. Sadly, the regulars spend very little time together in this book, so it remains to be seen how that will play out.

What I find disappointing about the reintroduction of Ace is precisely that she spends so much time on her own, with her own supporting characters. That's fine, but I always felt that the best way to get a sense of how Ace has changed would be to examine how her relationships have changed, which is precisely what this book doesn't do. It also doesn't do much to address the circumstances surrounding Ace's departure in "Love and War". The result is that this looks like what it is: an awkward attempt to radically reinvent Ace into something better suited to the kinds of stories the NAs intended to explore. That's fine, but it needn't look as calculated as it is.

I don't have much to say about the themes of the book, none of which seemed particularly well-developed or integrated into the story. There's was also a great deal of sex in the book, and not healthy, happy, emotionally well-adjusted sex. Ace uses the promise of sex to scam her way into the story, and later is very nearly raped. One character spends most of the book subjecting another to a long line of unspecified sexual degradations, and the victim grows to enjoy her torture. It's very, very ugly stuff, and it doesn't really need to be here at all.

Constitutional Wankery

In law school, my favorite subject was Constitutional Law. Not only was Con Law my favorite subject out of the core 1L curriculum, but it remained my favorite subject throughout. Partly this was because my Con Law professor was awesome, and partly because she seemed to be very impressed with me. But mostly it was because Con Law dealt with incredibly weighty and significant issues of national and political importance. And because the debates you have in a Con Law class often cut to the very core of our fundamental notions of how things ought to be, exposing the irreconcilable differences that drive basically every political issue there is.

This is going to sound odd, but I think what I liked about Con Law was basically the same thing I liked about geometry in high school and symbolic logic in college. There are rules and there are facts. You apply the rules to the facts, and there you go. Of course, because Con Law doesn't have the luxury of staying within the highly abstract worlds of Euclidian space and formal logic, in practice it's not nearly as mechanical as I've made it sound. For one thing, just about everything is a matter if debate. The Pythagorean Theorem applies to all right triangles. No one's going to come along and argue that it shouldn't apply to this particular right triangle because it's bigger than most, because it's made up of green lines rather than black lines, or because it's gay.

Still, the mechanistic form of the arguments was appealing to me. A federal law seems to discriminate against a particular class of people. Is it a protected class? If not, then it's okay as long as there is some rational basis for the law. If so, then the government needs to show that the law serves a compelling state interest and is as minimally discriminatory as possible.

In the years since law school, I've really soured on Con Law. A big part of this is because I've soured on the Constitution itself, but that's a topic for another day (in fact, this post is sort of laying the groundwork for subsequent posts I want to write about how the Constitution either causes or prevents us from solving a large portion of the political problems we face as a nation). But it's largely due to a growing frustration over the application of these mechanistic rules.

There is no better example of this than the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, aka "Obamacare"). Specifically, how much of that debate revolved around broccoli. The argument was that if the government can't mandate that everyone should buy broccoli, which it has no reason to do, then it also cannot mandate that everyone should buy health insurance, which is a crucial component of reforms designed to expand coverage to tens of millions of people who would not otherwise have it. I don't want to get too far into the policy nitty gritty, but the basic idea is that we need to get young, healthy people into the risk pool so that insurance companies can afford to cover older, sicker people.

Arguing about broccoli is a frankly stupid way to resolve such a crucially important issue as this. And the outcome of the case suggests to me that Chief Justice Roberts may have realized that. While he agreed with the conservative wing of the Court on pretty much everything, Roberts found a bizarre and implausible rationale to allow him to avoid invalidating the individual mandate.

And then there's the hypocrisy. Because even as these cases are being decided on absurdly irrelevant grounds, everyone treats the whole process with exaggerated reverence, as if this isn't a fundamentally bizarre method of resolving some of the most important questions we face as a nation. In his confirmation hearing, future Chief Justice Roberts talked about "calling balls and strikes". Not only is this a really bad analogy for what the Jusicial branch (especially the Supreme Court) actually does, but it was also a nakedly self-serving lie. Justices don't call balls and strikes. They manipulate the strike zone more or less at will to achieve the results they desire.

Most people will tell you that this is precisely what judges must never do, but I disagree. It's precisely what they should do, but they should be open about it, rather than devising elaborate legalistic justifications which just end up creating the bizarre mechanistic rules which will be used to evaluate the next important issue. Look at Bush v. Gore. Five Justices wanted George W. Bush to be president, and the legalistic rationale they came up with to support that conclusion was so bad that they had to explicitly say that it was never to be cited as precedent in any subsequent case.

Now the Court is considering same-sex marriage and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In oral arguments in the latter case, Justice Kagan cited the House report, which explicitly stated that the purpose of that bill was to express moral disapproval of homosexuality. They attorney hired to defend the law said (paraphrasing) "If that's enough for you to strike down the law, you should strike down the law, but that shouldn't be enough." Really? Is there anything more relevant than that? Congress itself said that they passed this law because they hate gays, and they wanted the gays to know that. That shouldn't be enough to strike down the law? No, because there are all of these complicated, abstract, mechanistic rules that need to be carefully considered.

I'm confident that the portions of DOMA currently being challenged will be struck down. I'm confident that same-sex marriage will be legally recognized across the country, without exception, sooner or later. And these are important wins for gay rights, for civil rights, and for the vision of America as a land of opportunity for all people. But the bizarre and irrelevant arguments on which these decisions will turn should be seen as an insult. We should recognize same-sex marriage because it's the right thing to do, because it will make us a better country and a stronger people, and because anti-gay discrimination is shameful and can no longer be tolerated. Not because it just catches the inside corner of an arbitrary and ever-shifting strike zone.

What is Required for Moral Responsibility?

Ever since I first encountered it, I've been fascinated by the philosophical issue of Free Will. My views on the subject have changed quite a bit over the years, but I've always been interested in it.

As a undergraduate philosophy major in the late 1990s, I once wrote a paper and delivered a lecture on the topic. Since then, neuroscience has taken some big leaps forward, and we know a lot more now than we did them about what's happening in our brains when we make decisions. And the more we learn about that process, the harder it is to sustain a belief in free will. But then discussions of free will inevitably descend into tedious semantic wrangling over what is meant by "free will". So I want to come at the problem from a different direction. What sort of free will do we need to have in order to make sense of common notions if moral responsibility?

What must be true in order for a person to deserve praise or blame for her choices? What does it take for a person to be responsible for his actions? Let's think of some cases where people aren't typically held responsible, and see where that takes us. We can start with obvious cases. If you've a gun to your head, you do what you're told, and you're not responsible for that. You're also not responsible for involuntary actions, or actions you were somehow powerless to prevent. Along the lines of the insanity defense, you're not responsible for actions taken when you're incapable of exercising reason or judgment. Just from these few simple examples, we're beginning to get a picture of what responsibility requires.

We generally consider people to be responsible for the conscious decisions they make without duress while in their right mind, and that seems like a pretty good rule of thumb. Certainly that's how legal responsibility tends to function. Moral responsibility isn't quite the same thing, though. I think moral responsibility requires more, and that's where our growing knowledge of the functions if the brain poses serious challenges.

At the level of the brain, choices are the end result of a chain of physical causes stretching back as far as you care to go, of which we are not consciously aware and over which we have no control. Not just out choices, but also our desires, inclinations, and moods. Suppose I offer you a choice between vanilla ice cream and chocolate ice cream. You prefer chocolate, so you choose chocolate. If you had preferred vanilla, you would have chosen vanilla. Can you be responsible for choosing the option you prefer if you're not responsible for preferring it?

Among contemporary philosophers, the battle over free will largely breaks down into compatibilists (who think that free will is compatible with determinism) versus incompatibilists (who think determinism rules out free will). Compatibilists often seek to revise our unsophisticated, "common sense" notion of free will into something that fits comfortably in a deterministic universe. But my question is always whether this revised version of free will is enough to rescue moral responsibility, to make sense of notions like praise and blame or pride and shame.

I plan to revisit the issue of free will quite a bit. Like I said, it fascinates me. I also happen to think it's important, but I'll make that case in a subsequent post.

The Best SecDef

Cover by Adi Granov

I'm a member of Marvel Unlimited, which is a subscription service which allows me to read lots of Marvel comics online at no additional charge. The problem with comic books, it seems to me, is that they are obscenely expensive. Consider a six-issue story line, which seems to be a pretty common format these days. That's gonna cost you $12, and what are you getting for that money? Compared to pretty much any other format of fiction, comic books give you pretty much the least bang for your buck. A subscription service changes that analysis tremendously.

Anyway, lately I've been reading from a pretty broad rotation of Marvel titles (including just about the entire Ultimate universe), and moving chronologically forward little by little. I'm currently reading books from late 2003/early 2004. The story I read most recently was "The Best Defense" (The Invincible Iron Man 73-78, December 2003 to May 2004) written by John J. Miller. The story involves Tony Stark getting himself nominated to be Secretary of Defense, which means having to face hostile questioning from the US Senate while also dealing with a rogue Pentagon official making dangerously unauthorized use of Stark weapons technology. (It's worth noting that the Pentagon is a complete shambles at this point, as the previous Secretary of Defense, Dell Rusk, turned out to be the Red Skull in disguise.)

It's a pretty good story, all things considered. It's a bit predictable (the Senate rejects the Stark nomination, until Tony heroically averts a disaster in the final issue of the story-arc, causing the Senate to reconsider and unanimously confirm him), but I always appreciate superhero stories that involve more than just beating up bad guys, and this one certainly does. But there's one aspect of the story that bothers me greatly. The story uses the likenesses of Bush and Cheney for President and Vice-President. They even get lines and everything.

The story isn't overtly political. Stark refuses even to say whether he's a Republican. But thinking about this story in the context of what was going on at the time it was released, how could it not be political? In late 2003, early 2004, it was gradually becoming clear to everyone that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. President Bush was under pressure to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who showed disastrously poor judgment over every aspect of the war.

"The Best Defense" doesn't get into any of that, of course, and I'm not suggesting that it should have. But reading it now, on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, is disturbing in a way that the writer never could have anticipated. And there's something vaguely off-putting about depicting a fictional version of a real president. In this story, for example, Bush is not a feckless rube completely under the sway of Dick Cheney and his neoconservative cronies. While I have no reason to believe that anyone at Marvel was deliberately trying to prop up the president, that's what they're doing.

I understand the desire to refer to current events in stories. It helps ground the story in real life, which can be an important asset. But there's a downside to that as well. For one thing, those aspects will quickly make your story seem dated. For another thing, it means opening up your story to new and unintended interpretations driven by subsequent events. Neither of those problems are fatal, but I'm of the opinion that superhero comics should probably avoid incorporating real political figures into their stories.

War as Last Resort

It seems that everyone agrees that war should be a last resort, to be pursued only when all peaceful options have been exhausted. At least, that's what everyone says. And it's easy to see why. It takes only the most superficial appreciation of the horrors of warfare to conclude that war is to be avoided whenever possible. But it also takes only a superficial knowledge of US Foreign Policy to realize that no one in a position of power actually believes this. Has any US war since World War II been a true "last resort"? Even after 9/11, was it absolutely necessary to launch a military invasion of Afghanistan? No. And the fact that the US is still occupying Afghanistan in what has become the longest war in American history strongly suggests that war was probably not the best option either.

The problem with the "last resort" formulation is that it's too vague. It doesn't seem vague on the surface. It seems abundantly clear: do not resort to war unless there is no other option. But it leaves out any weighing of policy goals. "No other option" to achieve what?

President Obama said in an interview which aired on Israeli television yesterday that Iran is one year away from developing a nuclear weapon. He apparently did not explain how he knows this, and as we commemorate the ten-year anniversary of one of the most disastrous of America's many unnecessary wars, it pays to be skeptical. But for the sake of argument, let's assume both that Obama has reliable intelligence supporting the claim, and that the claim is true (the failure to make this distinction lay at the heart of the US media's complicity in selling the Iraq War). Let's also assume, for the sake of argument, that we have good reason to believe that invading Iran is the only way to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Would that satisfy the "last resort" rule?

First, notice how incredibly unrealistic these assumptions are. The nature of intelligence gathering is such that you can't ever really be sure about these things. In addition to the liars and scoundrels in the upper echelons of the Bush Administration, there were also lots of people who really believed that Iraq had WMDs and that the US had strong evidence of this, neither of which was true. There's always going to be a degree of uncertainty. But let's overlook that for now.

Second, notice the counterfactual at the heart of the analysis. How do you know that war is the only way to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons? You can try other means and fail, of course, and that's not nothing. But there's still some built-in uncertainty involved. Saying that there is no other way means that any other way you might try will fail, and that is inherently speculative. There's really no way to know when you've actually reached the point of "no other way". But again, let's overlook that for now.

Third, let's make explicit the unspoken assumption that invading Iran will in fact prevent Iran from developing nukes. No one ever seems to question this, which strikes me as highly problematic, but once again, let's just accept it.

Now, notice how thoroughly we have stacked the deck in favor of invasion. We have stipulated that Iran is one year away from developing nukes, that invading Iran is the only way to prevent this, and that invading Iran actually will prevent this. Given these assumptions, I think we've built a far stronger case for war than any case which could conceivably be built by the Obama Administration or anyone else. Does this case satisfy the "last resort" test?

No. Because acquiescence is also an option. It's not a very attractive option, I grant you. As a matter of policy, the United States has very good reasons for wanting to keep Iran nuke-free. But then war with Iran is also not a very attractive option. Iran is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It would not be an "easy" war (and yes, those two wars, which together have taken two decades to wage, have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, one of which continues to this day and is not going at all well, were "easy").

That's the piece that is always left out of the "last resort" analysis. Some things just aren't worth going to war over. Even some very serious things aren't worth going to war over, because war is awful! I would prefer Iran to have a nuclear weapon than for the United States to invade Iran. That's my own personal view, and there's loads of room for reasonable disagreement, but I think that's the conversation we need to have. We need to recognize that war with Iran will carry a tremendous cost, and as we've seen from Iraq and Afghanistan, a cost that is very difficult to predict in advance. We've also learned (or should have learned) that wars are far easier to begin than they are to end.

I don't know where Obama is on the issue of Iran. I believe that he and his administration would prefer to avoid war, but I don't know if they're willing to accept a nuclear Iran in order to do that. If I was president, I wouldn't say out loud that I'm not willing to go to war over this. I would say exactly what Obama is saying: all options are on the table. The trouble is, there are political pressures involved, and the US electorate really loves war (as long as other people, and other people's kids, are the ones fighting it). As soon as it appears that there is no other way to prevent Iran from developing nukes, the political pressure will increase enormously.

Although I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, I did not vote for him in 2012. I had many, many reasons for making that decision, but one of the bigger ones is that I don't trust Obama to keep us out of Iran. When he voted against the Iraq War in 2002 as an Illinois state legislator, Obama said that he is not anti-war, but anti-dumb-wars. And Iraq certainly was a dumb war. But looking back over the history of American wars since World War II, it's hard to miss how many of them have come to be seen as either utter disasters or just not worth the costs involved. I think we need a hell of a lot more anti-war voices in government, because we've got a clear and unambiguous record of being insufficiently reluctant to start wars.

Depression

I don't want to get too personal here. I may be narcissistic enough to suppose that people might be interested in my opinions, but even I don't expect anyone to be interested in me. I think my opinions are the most interesting thing about me. Otherwise, I'm quite dull.

I suffer from depression. I dislike this way of putting it, because "suffer from" seems to be a phrase that has somehow been drained of any meaning it might otherwise have. "I suffer from depression" is really just a way of saying "I have depression, which is an ongoing medical condition, as opposed to just the mood I happen to be in right now because of something that happened recently which made me sad." That's an important distinction to make, and the "suffer from" construction makes it economically. It just seems forced and unnatural to me.

Depression is often a difficult thing for people to understand if they don't have first-hand experience of it. This isn't a huge problem as long as people realize that they don't understand. I don't understand alcoholism. I've never in my life felt compelled to have a drink, so I really can't imagine what that's like. But I understand addiction more generally, so I don't assume that refraining from drinking is as easy for everyone as it for me. People who don't understand depression and who also don't realize that they don't understand often assume that coping with a "bad mood" should be as easy for everyone as it is for them. It's not.

For one thing, when people who don't have depression feel depressed, there's often an identifiable cause. That doesn't necessarily make the depression any easier to deal with in the moment, but it can often lead to productive ways of responding to the feeling by addressing the cause. When there's no identifiable cause, or when the emotional reaction is disproportionate to the trigger which produced it, that's not always very helpful.

What I find so devastating about depression is the enormous impact it has on a person's lived experience. Even those of us who have twigged that depression is a medical problem consider it to be a relatively minor one, and in most cases I think that's fair. However, our conscious moment-to-moment experience of our lives is in a very real sense all we have, and for a person with depression, it's degraded. Most medical conditions are bad to the extent that they impair us in some way, either by cutting our lives short or by otherwise undermining our ability to do the things we enjoy. Depression, on the other hand, has a direct impact on our conscious experiences. There's no such thing as asymptomatic depression.

And then, of course, there's suicide. Because suicide is the result of a person's conscious decision to end his life, we tend to think of it differently from deaths caused by other ailments. People with cancer die of cancer. People with depression kill themselves. There is an undeniable intuitive appeal to this distinction, but I think it's an illusion, and at the very least an unhelpful one. Whether a disease causes death by triggering organ failure or by inducing someone to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills, the result is pretty much the same.

I don't mean for this blog to get too personal, but I do suffer from depression. When I feel depressed, I don't want to do anything. Sometimes I can distract myself with something I enjoy, but depression for me often means that I don't enjoy the things I normally enjoy. As an experiment, I'm going to try to write about depression when I'm feeling depressed. I don't have any particular goal in mind. I just thought it might be a useful thing for me to do.

Looking Back in Anger: Introduction

I expect I'll be devoting several posts in the coming weeks to the Iraq War, the tenth anniversary of which is approaching later this month. MSNBC recently aired (and will soon rerun) an hour-long documentary about the efforts of the Bush Administration to drum up public support for the invasion. The documentary was based on "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War" by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, which I've just finished reading. It's an invaluable resource for anyone who wants a comprehensive, detailed understanding of the complicated story of how so many people could have fucked up so badly.

Unfortunately, I don't feel that we've really learned any of the lessons of the Iraq War. The same people who convinced us to invade Iraq are now trying to convince us to invade Iran, and they don't seem to have lost any of the undeserved credibility they were afforded before. More worryingly, none of the people who demonstrated the wisdom, foresight, and courage required to oppose the Iraq War from the outset have gained any credibility. Even today, the range of acceptable views on foreign policy runs from John Kerry and Chuck Hagel on the left (people who were initially wrong about Iraq, but eventually realized they had been wrong) and John McCain on the right (who still thinks that Iraq, and every other real or hypothetical war he's ever imagined, was a really good idea). If you were right about Iraq from the beginning, you're just as much of a crackpot as you were in 2003.

One of the most depressing things about "Hubris" is the total lack of accountability. The power to go to war is the most awesome power the government has, and it must always be exercised with maximum care, with the utmost caution, and only with the greatest reluctance. But the political reality is that it will always be safer, easier, and far more comfortable to support war than to oppose it. This means that the crucial political checks that should constrain the use of military power in a democracy failed to function. Part of this was because the Bush Administration deliberately made it politically awkward to oppose the war by scheduling a key Congressional vote just weeks before the 2002 midterm elections, but mostly it's because Americans really like war.

Lately, I tend to see the problem as a failure of our political systems. We all know that there are circumstances which make war justified (or perhaps just unavoidable) and circumstances where war is not justified, but our political systems cannot reliably tell these circumstances apart. While it is certainly helpful that we now have a thoughtful, intelligent, and rational president, that may not be enough, and it won't be the case forever. We need to rethink the process by which the decision to invade another country is made.

Just Stop Discriminating

The US Supreme Court drives me nuts. It has a crucially important role to play in our society, but it goes about its business in a manner that strikes me as absurdly, even perversely disconnected from reality. And the case challenging the constitutionality of Sec. 5 of the Voting Rights Act is another fine example of what I mean.

One thing that the Voting Rights Act does is it establishes a set of "covered jurisdictions", which are states or parts of states with a demonstrated record of recent racial discrimination in the area of voting. If any of these covered jurisdictions want to change their elections laws, rules, policies, or procedures, they have to run their proposed changes by the Department of Justice to make sure that the changes will not have a discriminatory impact. If the changes will have a discriminatory impact, intentional or otherwise, they're blocked before they even take effect. This is called pre-clearance. Outside the covered district, there is no pre-clearance requirement.

Based on media reports, oral arguments before the Justices focused on a lot of trivial issues. This is often the case. Justices wanted to know if the South was more racist than other regions of the country, for example. I don't know what it means for a political/geographic region to be "racist". If I answer the question "yes", what am I really saying? Am I saying that more people are racists in the South, or that they're more racist? Am I saying that everyone in the South is racist, and everyone outside the South is not? Does any of that stuff even matter?

What I'll say instead is that, according to the factual record compiled by the United States Congress in 2006, when the Voting Rights Act was renewed and extended for 25 years following 21 hearings over 10 months which produced 15,000 pages of evidence, the covered jurisdictions represent 25% of the total US population, but account for 80% of cases of proven discrimination in election law. Does that make the South (where most, but not all, of the covered jurisdictions can be found) more racist? I don't know. Does it even matter? The important thing is that the VRA is designed to target discrimination where it happens, and it happens most in the covered jurisdictions.

But forget about the legal arguments for a minute. Never mind the precedents, or the historical record, or the text of the 14th Amendment, or the original intent of the 14th Amendment. Forget all that nonsense and just decide what you think we should do.

It's important for you to know that a county or state can get itself removed from the list of covered jurisdictions by not trying to discriminate against minorities for ten years. If Shelby County, Alabama wants to get out from under the thumb of the DoJ, all it has to do is stop discriminating. Lots of jurisdictions have gotten themselves excused for good behavior, so to speak. If there was no racial discrimination in voting anywhere in the country for a span of ten years, then Sec. 5 would be effectively repealed. There would be no more covered jurisdictions.

The fact that Shelby County, Alabama can't get itself out of the covered jurisdictions (because it keeps trying to pass discriminatory voting changes) should be all the reason anyone needs to continue to support the law.

Seder vs. Alter

My favorite political podcast is The Majority Report with Sam Seder. It's perfect for people who are interested in politics, but primarily motivated by public policy. Sam is a comedian, so he does spend a fair amount of time making fun of Republicans. That would be enough to make the podcast an enjoyable one for me. I like Sam, and I like making fun of Republicans, and I really like it when people who are funnier or better informed than I am make fun of Republicans. Bill Maher and W. Kamau Bell are funnier than I am. Sam is funnier and better informed.

On today's program, Sam interviewed Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg about a column Alter published last Thursday, February 28, called "Why Democrats Must Get Smart on Entitlements". Alter is a self-described liberal Democrat, so you might think that a liberal podcast would be welcome territory for him. Not in this instance. Alter has been irritating other self-described liberal Democrats quite a bit recently. Both last Thursday's column and today's interview with Sam (which I've embedded as a series of YouTube videos) demonstrate why.

The first weakness of the column is that Alter neglects to explain why Democrats must get smart on entitlements. For a column called "Why Democrats Must Get Smart on Entitlements", it's a doozy of a weakness. Alter gestures vaguely in the direction of an explanation when he does a quick run-down of a few projected economic statistics. To my way of thinking, this should be the meat of the column, but it's barely there. He trots out a couple of scary-sounding factoids divorced from any sort of context which might make sense of them. But he doesn't identify the assumptions that these projections are based on, and he doesn't talk much about other means of averting those terrible consequences. And even that assumes that those terrible consequences really will happen and that they really will be terrible.

He doesn't both much with actual math (or at least, he doesn't show his work), but his argument basically consists of projecting Social Security and Medicare costs into the future, taking into account increasing healthcare costs and the fact that the elderly population in this country is going to skyrocket with the Baby Boomers. He's not wrong about that. But he assumes that the total size of the budgetary pie will remain roughly the same, so if we're spending more on Social Security and Medicare, we must therefore be spending less on something else. And he's worried about that something else, and he's not wrong about that either. But he does pretty much ignore the possibility that taxes will be increased.

Arguably, it's safe to assume that taxes won't be increased because the Republican Party is currently refusing to even go after greater revenue by other means. But that presumably can't last forever. Also, Alter overlooks the fact that the Affordable Care Act was designed to slow the rate of increase in healthcare costs, and early indications suggest that it may be working to some extent. A fundamental problem with trying to anticipate future economic conditions is that the factors which will determine those future conditions have themselves yet to be determined. For example, what will the US Federal Budget deficit be in Fiscal Year 2030? We could look up official government projections, but then we'd have to see what assumption were baked into those projections, and we'd have to ask ourselves if those assumptions were optimistic, pessimistic, or realistic. The real answer to the question is that the US federal budget deficit in Fiscal Year 2030 will be total revenue minus total expenditures, and both of those variables depend upon everything Congress does between now and then. So we really just don't know.  If we have 15 years of dynamite economic growth, tax revenue in 2030 will be a lot higher than if we have feeble growth and another two or three recessions over that period. And if Obamacare is particularly successful in slowing the growth of healthcare costs, the burden of the Baby Boomer generation may be lighter than we think.

So that's Strike One, as Alter simply fails to make his case. Strike Two comes when Alter suggests how we should approach entitlement reform. He says that we need to take a look at how programs like Social Security and Medicare were designed to operate. This sounds sensible, but it isn't. Those programs were designed decades ago to address situations which were current at the time. That doesn't mean the programs are obsolete now, but it does mean that we should be more interested in what we need those programs to achieve today, rather than what President Roosevelt or President Johnson needed those programs to achieve at the time. When Social Security was introduced, it was supposed to be one leg of a "three-legged stool" of retirement security, along with private pensions and personal savings. These days, not a lot of people have private pensions or much in the way of personal savings. A program adequate to meet the retirement security needs of 1933 won't be adequate to the needs of 2013, even if we do adjust for inflation and population growth. Social Security has a bigger and more important role to play today than it did 80 years ago. We should not allow ourselves to be guided by, much less constrained by, this rather strange sort of "policy originalism".

Strike Three is perhaps not really a strike at all. It may be more of a foul ball, but that totally messes up the metaphor. Alter takes issue with a common liberal argument against means testing, but he once again fails to make a very strong case. The argument that he takes issue with is that we shouldn't means test these earned benefits, because then they'll only get paid out to low-income people. When that happens, the high-income people who run this country will start to view them as forms of welfare, and they'll start to reduce benefits and attach onerous conditions, just like they did to actual welfare under President Clinton. Alter simply doesn't think this prediction is credible, and he could be right. It's hard to be very confident, though. After all, even before we've done much means testing, the high-income people who run this country have already decided that we need to cut back on Social Security and Medicare benefits. Alter's assertion is that even if A happens (means testing), it won't lead to B (benefit cuts), even though the reality is that we're already pursuing B despite the fact that A hasn't happened yet.

In his conversation with Sam, Alter wasn't able to do much to strengthen his argument. Several times he pooh-poohed an alternative offered by Sam as politically impossible, without ever acknowledging that his own recommendations are also politically impossible in an atmosphere where Republicans steadfastly refuse to accept any deal. He also seems to assume that if a good policy fix is unavailable, a bad policy fix must be sought instead. That's not necessarily true. Any policy fix will have consequences, and it's entirely possible that the consequences of reforming entitlements the way Alter wants could be worse than the consequences of doing nothing at all.

Ultimately, the debate comes down to how much of a long-term budget problem you think we have. The conventional wisdom is that were cruising blithely toward a looming catastrophe, and if we don't do something fairly drastic fairly soon, we're going to be in big trouble. That is the case with climate change, but it's not the case with budget. The mainstream view among economists is that we do have a long-term budget problem, and the long-term health of Social Security and Medicare are threatened by that problem, but it's not entirely clear how serious that problem is going to be, and in any case, there's no particularly need to address is right now. But there's also a view that says we don't even have a long-term budget problem, which gives added weight to the wait-and-see approach. Alter doesn't seem to be aware, or at the very least fails to acknowledge, that the future calamity he's earnestly trying to solve many never happen at all.

Update: This article has been edited to correct one teeny tiny inconsequential little oversight. Ok, so I got confused between Jonathan Alter and Jonathan Chait. It was just a typo. Just an honest spelling error. Every single time.

The Necessity of Rules

I've been an enormous fan of "Up w/ Chris Hayes" since it premiered in September, 2011. It's simply the best political talk show I've ever seen. It's not one of those "paid flacks shouting at each other" shows. Chris Hayes assembles a panel full of knowledgeable, insightful people, and they proceed to discuss issues more deeply and more thoroughly than anywhere else on television. I can't recommend this show highly enough, and you can watch it online at your convenience. If you have any interest in politics or public policy, you won't regret it.

This weekend, Hayes spent some time on the Voting Rights Act, which is currently being challenged before the US Supreme Court. In the midst of a long and fascinating conversation which approached the issue from several different perspectives, Hayes made one point in particular that struck me. He challenged the assumption that the goal of any civil rights legislation is to make itself obsolete. He challenged the assumption that the day will come when racism has been eliminated and we will no longer need laws protecting minority interests. This assumption is not often stated, and it's even more rarely challenged. And it needs to be challenged. There is no better illustration of this than the fact that Shelby County, Alabama argued before the Court last week that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed. (I'll have more to say about the legal issues in a subsequent post.)

This all reminds of a brief exchange in a "Doctor Who" episode from the sixth series. In "A Good Man Goes to War", the Doctor challenges Madame Kovarian's characterization of him as a good man. He says "Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many." I've always hated that line. It's faux-macho, it's clunky, and it's totally wrong. It suggests that good people don't need rules because they're naturally good. They'll be good with or without rules. It's this same intuition that tells people civil rights legislation is just a temporary corrective that won't be needed forever.

These are two very different examples of the same erroneous assumption. The assumption is that being good is somehow a state of being, when it is actually more like a way of doing things. A good person does need rules, but more in the sense of heuristics than a set of proscriptive admonitions. We need heuristics which allow us to anticipate or evade mistakes which we know we're likely to make. Look at criminal law, for example. In the United States, we have a heuristic that says you can't be incarcerated for a crime unless you're found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The reason that heuristic is important is that it's all too easy to imagine a situation where "everyone just knows" that the defendant is guilty, but "everyone" happens to be mistaken.

There will never be a point where we outgrow concepts like the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof. We will never become so morally enlightened that such concepts can be dispensed with. The measure of whether a verdict is good is whether those heuristics were adhered to. This is important: the test isn't whether the guilty are convicted and the innocent acquitted (although that is what we hope will happen most of the time). If the heuristics were properly applied, then in a certain sense, whatever result you get is a good result. We will always need rules like those. Similarly, we will always need rules against voting discrimination. There will never come a time when it ceases to be a good idea to make sure election rules don't racially discriminate. Even if our society one day becomes so enlightened that racism ceases to exist, even that would only protect us from intentional discrimination. But for all practical purposes, unintentional discrimination is just as bad. We'll always want to be on the lookout for that.

Just as the rules of evidence are constitutive of a good verdict, and therefore a good criminal justice system, so the standard rules governing human interactions are constitutive of personal morality, and therefore good people. Let's take a closer look at the Doctor's situation. The Doctor is angry that Kovarian has targeted his friends to get to him. Kovarian says she's not concerned about his anger, because he's a good man, and good men have rules. She means that he won't kill her for revenge, despite being sufficiently angry to do so. Despite the Doctor's denial, Kovarian is exactly right. The Doctor has a rule against killing, generally. Because he has a rule against killing, he won't kill Kovarian even when angry and tempted. And because he won't kill Kovarian even when angry and tempted, he is a good man. His goodness comes from the fact that he has these rules, this way of doing things which says that in moments of high emotion when you're least inclined to act with restraint are the moments when it's most important that you do act with restraint. To bring another TV show into the discussion, this is also the answer to President Bartlet's question "What is the virtue of a proportional response?" The doctrine of proportional response is a heuristic. Adhering to that heuristic is how you know that you haven't gone too far.