The Sunlight Foundation has set up Elena’s Inbox, a site that makes it easy[er] to browse through the dump of Elena Kagan’s Clinton-era emails.
However, it looks like they’ve certainly held something back. Can it really be that she sent no emails containing “lol” or “rofl” or “omg“?
There are various opinions and debates over the “proper” roles of government, but I’m pretty sure that combing the Indian Ocean to find a missing 16-year-old who’s sailing around the world by herself in order to break a world record isn’t one of them:
Abby Sunderland’s family was talking with U.S. and international governments about organizing a search of the remote ocean between southern Africa and Australia, family spokesman Christian Pinkston said.
[...]
“We’ve got to get a plane out there quick,” said Pinkston, who was in close contact with Sunderland’s family in Thousand Oaks.
“They are exhausting every resource to try to mobilize an air rescue including discussions with the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Coast Guard and various international rescue organizations,” he said.
I hope the girl is OK and everything, but the State Department and Coast Guard better send the bill to her family, not to the rest of us.
I live in a city that’s full of Obama supporters. (The two notable exceptions are me and the guy in front of me on the freeway the other day with three different Dennis Kucinich stickers on his car.) And so during the 2008 elections I had ample opportunities to ask questions about why people supported him.
“Aren’t you concerned,” I would often ask, “that he doesn’t have much useful experience running anything? Is being a law professor and a Senator really useful preparation for being chief executive of Leviathan?”
“I see what you’re saying,” they’d inevitably answer, “but look at the streamlined, coolly effective campaign he’s running. That’s all the evidence I need of his executive skills.”
Accordingly, now that his executive skills are coming into question due to his perceived lack of leadership on the BP oil disaster, I humbly suggest that he demonstrate leadership by returning to his roots:
In an upcoming New York Times piece, David Leonhardt points out that people aren’t good at reasoning about low-probability events:
We make two basic — and opposite — types of mistakes. When an event is difficult to imagine, we tend to underestimate its likelihood. This is the proverbial black swan. Most of the people running Deepwater Horizon probably never had a rig explode on them. So they assumed it would not happen, at least not to them.
[...]
On the other hand, when an unlikely event is all too easy to imagine, we often go in the opposite direction and overestimate the odds. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans canceled plane trips and took to the road. There were no terrorist attacks in this country in 2002, yet the additional driving apparently led to an increase in traffic fatalities.
I would probably call these the same mistake, rather than two different ones, but that’s a minor quibble. I’ll also avoid taking issue with his references to the “true probability” of an event, which would probably take us into areas too philosophical for a family-friendly blog such as this one.
A more major quibble is with the following:
When the stakes are high enough, it falls to government to help its citizens avoid these entirely human errors. The market, left to its own devices, often cannot do so.
I’m not sure which government Leonhardt is thinking of, but the only ones I’m familiar with are made up of humans who routinely commit, um, “entirely human errors.”
I’m willing to agree that “markets” are pretty lousy at predicting the odds of never-before-seen events — though BP’s safety procedures are presumably set through some combination of BP internal policy (not a market) and government regulation (also not a market). But are governments any better at predicting the odds of never-before-seen events?
The article admits that maybe they’re not:
Yet in the case of Deepwater Horizon, government policy actually went the other way. It encouraged BP to underestimate the odds of a catastrophe.
In a little-noticed provision in a 1990 law passed after the Exxon Valdez spill, Congress capped a spiller’s liability over and above cleanup costs at $75 million for a rig spill. Even if the economic damages — to tourism, fishing and the like — stretch into the billions, the responsible party is on the hook for only $75 million.
Exxon Mobil earns $6 billion a quarter. $75 million is about 1% of this amount. Even if you have an oil spill every quarter, that damage cap is a rounding error to profits. It might as well not exist.
In fact, if you dig deeper, this has nothing to do with cognitive error at all. It’s not that people working in government can’t estimate the odds of a spill, it’s that they’re more concerned that their friends in the oil industry don’t suffer too much when a spill inevitably occurs:
Senators David Vitter of Louisiana and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, both Republicans, introduced a bill yesterday that would create a liability cap equal to the last four quarters of the responsible party’s profits or double the current limit, whichever is larger.
“Making a company at fault pay their last four quarters of profits is much more effective way to ensure that energy companies actually pay for their mistakes without chasing many of them out of business,” said Vitter, in a release.
Yes, well, it’s also an effective way to ensure that they take more huge-downside risks than they would if you didn’t cap their damages. But the important thing is that they stay in business! Just like the important thing was that AIG stay in business, and that GM stay in business, and that Fannie Mae stay in business.
In markets, companies fail. Companies that can’t meet their liabilities go out of business, and new companies replace them. That’s how markets work. That’s the discipline that markets rely on. Those are the incentives that proponents of markets have in mind.
Because when you artificially insulate companies from the consequences of their actions, that’s not a market. It’s a recipe for reckless risk-taking and gross malfeasance.
To be sure, I’m not claiming that absent this 1990 law and similar policies, BP would have made smart decisions about the drilling risks they took. But they almost certainly would have made smarter decisions.
If only there were a term for the cognitive bias wherein one systematically overestimates the odds that a law written by self-serving politicians is likely to make a complex situation better.
Tonight at dinner I started got into an extended argument about technocracy, during which it was asserted to me that whatever faults I might find with our government could be quickly resolved if only we started electing really brilliant people to office.
This not uncommon belief that enlightened technocrats and politicians could easily solve complex problems demonstrates what the New York Times calls Fix-It Faith:
Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet … over the past month it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.
This is a refreshing admission from the Times. I bet they’re referring to the panoply of unintended consequences that are turning up in the (based on science) Health Care Reform bill they advocated for.
Wait, did I say the article was about politicians? I meant to say that it was about deep sea drilling:
“We’re pushing the envelope, but I personally believe that the technology, in terms of equipment and processes, will be able to keep up with what we’re doing — though this experience may slow things down,” said Stefan Mrozewski, a senior staff associate at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, whose research involves projects like drilling boreholes in deep water to study chemicals under the seafloor.
[...]
He said the blowout on the rig and the apparent failure of the blowout preventer was “beyond the realm of expectation,” most likely a combination of unimaginable human and mechanical error. Noting that rigorous planning precedes deepwater drilling, yet “the risk is still not zero,” he said the accident last month would encourage designers and engineers to improve the technology and procedures, so that a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon explosion could not happen again.
Nonetheless, with his science background, his faith that “improved procedures” will surely stop the next disaster, his demonstrated facility at writing off unexpected consequences of risky projects as “beyond the realm of expectation,” and his inability to imagine errors, he totally could be a technocratic politician.
If only they’d thought to ask whether he has any really clever ideas on financial reform or carbon rationing.
Here in Washington State, hard liquor can only be purchased at dreary, state-run liquor stores. Most have DMV-ish levels of charm, DMV-ish levels of customer service, DMV-ish hours, DMV-ish selection, and DMV-ish prices.
Every few years someone will propose getting the state out of the liquor-store business, or at least allowing private businesses to sell liquor, like they’re allowed to in most of the civilized world. In California you can buy whiskey at Trader Joe’s, and — while California is falling apart at the seams — it’s hard to believe it has much to do with grocery-store booze. Here in Washington, Costco members seem to be eternally salivating at the prospect of Costco-sized 10-gallon jugs of vodka, while the rest of us just dream of having our own BevMo!
However, these proposals always seem to fall prey to the 21st-century version of Bootleggers and Baptists, which I’ll call “Unions and Unions.”
Here, the Unions play the role of the Baptists, making the case that our current system promotes virtue and temperance:
We have been opposed to this kind of proposal for years and remain opposed to it and feel the emerging coalition of people opposed to it shows how bad the idea is,” said Tom Geiger, communications director for UFCW 21. “We will actively work with health and safety advocates and others to make sure that the public is made fully aware of the dangers to the public safety posed by making liquor available in neighborhood grocery and convenience stores.”
Meanwhile, the Unions play the role of the Bootleggers, not wanting to give up their lucrative monopoly:
Task forces have repeatedly determined that private stores would not create more revenue for the state in the short or long term. What it would accomplish is the elimination more than 1,000 family-wage jobs. These experienced, safety-oriented state employees have the best compliance rate in the nation for preventing liquor sales to minors.
In fact, the only ones worrying about what might be good for consumers seem to be the large grocers:
The Northwest Grocery Association, which represents major chains including QFC and Safeway, has joined one of its largest members — Costco Wholesale — in supporting a voter petition to put Washington state out of the liquor-store business.
Sure, they’re acting purely out of their own self-interest, but at least for once it coincides with the common good.
However, lest this restore your faith in the power of markets, it’s worth pointing that the small grocers remain opposed to this change. While they make all the right noises about “morals” and “temperance,” they accidentally let slip their true motivation:
Small grocers oppose the measure, saying it would be difficult for them to compete against big chains offering low liquor prices. With other products, they can offer customers local or higher quality alternatives, but “a bottle of vodka is a bottle of vodka,” said Jan Gee, president and chief executive of the Washington Food Industry Association, which represents independent grocers.
In other words, “I can’t provide that service as efficiently as my competitors, so we’ve got to keep it illegal!”
I’m no longer an academic, so I won’t bother writing a paper about this revolutionary new “Unions and Unions and Small Grocers” paradigm, but maybe one of you will? Sarah?
Seattle, in case you don’t follow our local politics, has got a mayoral election going on. (Technically it was last Tuesday, but they’re still counting the ballots.)
It’s a fairly interesting election, as elections go, if only because we junked the good-for-nothing incumbent in the primary, mostly on account of his failure (“think of the salmon!”) to remove snow from our roads last winter, which forced me to work from home for a week.
It’s also fairly uninteresting, in that the two primary-survivors, the Corporate Shill and the Ideologue, are both political neophytes. I actually met both of them, the former during an impromptu pre-primary baby-kissing session at Green Lake, the latter during a town hall at the local community center. They both seemed like, well, aspiring politicians.
And to be honest, neither is particularly appealing as a candidate. After losing their beloved incumbent, the city’s political and business “establishment” seems to have lined up behind the Corporate Shill. So I can’t support him. On the other hand, our douchebag alterna-weekly The Stranger hasn’t stopped tongue-bathing the Ideologue for months. So I can’t support him either.
(My preferred candidate was the former NBA player whose campaign platform seemed sensible. He came in 5th in the primary, I think.)
At last count the Ideologue is ahead by a few thousand votes, although there are still many left to count, so anything could happen.
Nonetheless, the aforementioned douchebag alterna-weekly makes the point that under either administration, the city council (and in particular its president) is poised to control an outsized share of the power in the city. This is probably the case, and I’m sure that any one of the three would continue the current policies of running the city into the ground.
There is one part of the article that leapt out at me as being, well, weird:
[City council president] Conlin sees the city pulling itself out of the gutter by embracing the most progressive elements of his environmental agenda. For example, a company called General Biodiesel—which uses primarily waste fats like cooking grease and tallow—was having a hard time getting permits, Conlin said, and by removing red tape Seattle was able to help that company (and, hopefully, laid down a marker that will help attract other green-job companies). “We should be targeting companies like that and asking, ‘What can we do to help you?’” he said.
I had to read this paragraph several times, because I wasn’t sure what part of was “progressive.” Nominally, it’s a story about making it easier to do business and in particular relaxing a permitting process. These are both pretty anti-progressive positions, so I can’t imagine that’s what he was referring to.
Instead, I figure, what he really meant was something along the lines of “let companies whose names contain green-sounding terms like ‘Biodiesel’ and ‘Renewable’ and ‘Sustainable’ ignore laws and regulations that apply to other, less-SWPL-friendly companies.” And indeed, this is the sort of Seattle “progressivism” I’ve gotten used to.
In anticipation of this new agenda, I’m thinking about renaming my publishing company to something more progressive, like “Compostable House,” “Biodegraded Books,” or “Post-Industrial Press.”
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