There was a lot wrong with Max Sawicky’s part in his WSJ debate with Tyler. This bit in particular exemplifies a mode of thought that really bugs me, and ought to bug people who care about democracy:

. . . the mission of the public sector in my view goes well beyond aid to the poor. Even in those terms, I pity the poor who wind up isolated in a ghetto of means-tested programs. Programs for the poor isolate their beneficiaries politically and end up poorly supported.

Here we have a nice statement of the principle that it is politically necessary to delude a broad swathe of the electorate into thinking they’re getting something out of a “social insurance” scheme, when, in fact, they get less than nothing, so that they will support welfare payments to people who really need it. The problem with means-tested welfare benefits is: big benefits will not be democratically popular, so, insofar as it is possible, the issue must be taken out of the domain of democratic choice.

Last night at the AFF panel on social security, Dean Baker made some point about how popular Social Security-as-we-know-it is, and that we live in a democracy, so if you don’t like it, well, too bad. I thought this was an extremely disingenous argument. From what I could make of him, Baker is an ideologue like Sawicky, and if it turned out that the democratic public became persuaded to radically alter the historical treasure of social policy that is Social Security, Baker would not just shrug and say, “Oh well, that’s democracy. The General Will has spoken!”

I’ve been surprised by the weakness of the conservative grassroots push for social security reform. Here’s some illumination from The Note:

When the President first enunciated his Social Security principles, business groups, prodded by the White House, said they’d spend millions to influence public opinion. That was predicated on the Administration’s announcing its support for a precise proposal early.

“We haven’t done it because Bush doesn’t have a plan yet,” said the Free Enterprise Fund’s Steve Moore. “It’s hard for anyone to mobilize conservative activists and conservative money until we all know that it’s a plan that’s worth mobilizing for.”

But, as I understand it, Bush doesn’t have a precise plan because he needs the ability to negotiate with Democrats in order to get a bill through Congress. That’s why he keeps saying that “everything’s on the table.” I think this may have been a huge mistake. First, by not endorsing a specific plan, you allow the opposition to play the vagueness to their advantage and to impute an unattractive plan to the administration, around which they can rally resistance. Second, you leave yourself and your advocates unable to defend your plan against the opposition. All you can say is: “That’s not the plan I have in mind.” Third, your grassroots support has nothing to rally around, and so keeps the money in the bank, as the AARP, Big Labor, etc., run riot. The public’s attention span for the issue may be short. So it’s a big loss to lose out in the first few rounds of the PR battle.

All this has to weighed against the bargaining advantages of public open-endedness about policy. But if you lose the public opinion war too badly, in part because of the strategy of vagueness, then the bargaining advantages of vagueness start to dissipate.

I hope that the adminstration’s doing some kind of rope-a-dope, and letting the anti-reform forces start to feel complacently self-congratulatory before wheeling out the big guns, and mobilizing the massive grassroots PR assault. I mean, that could happen, right?

The other night I was talking to my roommates about family, communes, thick normative concepts, and the nature of not-further-questionable reasons for action. Among our topics: Can “Because she’s your sister” be sufficient reason for doing something? Why “Why should I care that she’s my sister,” is both a necessary and unacceptable question.

This bit of Pinker’s excellent discussion of the Summers controversy reminded me of our conversation, which had absolutely nothing to do with women and math:

What are we to make of the breakdown of standards of intellectual discourse in this affair–the statistical innumeracy, the confusion of fairness with sameness, the refusal to glance at the scientific literature? It is not a disease of tenured radicals; comparable lapses can be found among the political right (just look at its treatment of evolution). Instead, we may be seeing the operation of a fascinating bit of human psychology.

The psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of taboo–the belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is sinful even to think them–is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or religious superstition but is ingrained into our moral sense. In 2000, he reported asking university students their opinions of unpopular but defensible proposals, such as allowing people to buy and sell organs or auctioning adoption licenses to the highest-bidding parents. He found that most of his respondents did not even try to refute the proposals but expressed shock and outrage at having been asked to entertain them. They refused to consider positive arguments for the proposals and sought to cleanse themselves by volunteering for campaigns to oppose them. Sound familiar?

The psychology of taboo is not completely irrational. In maintaining our most precious relationships, it is not enough to say and do the right thing. We have to show that our heart is in the right place and that we don’t weigh the costs and benefits of selling out those who trust us. If someone offers to buy your child or your spouse or your vote, the appropriate response is not to think it over or to ask how much. The appropriate response is to refuse even to consider the possibility. Anything less emphatic would betray the awful truth that you don’t understand what it means to be a genuine parent or spouse or citizen. (The logic of taboo underlies the horrific fascination of plots whose protagonists are agonized by unthinkable thoughts, such as Indecent Proposal and Sophie’s Choice.) Sacred and tabooed beliefs also work as membership badges in coalitions. To believe something with a perfect faith, to be incapable of apostasy, is a sign of fidelity to the group and loyalty to the cause. Unfortunately, the psychology of taboo is incompatible with the ideal of scholarship, which is that any idea is worth thinking about, if only to determine whether it is wrong.

At some point in the history of the modern women’s movement, the belief that men and women are psychologically indistinguishable became sacred. The reasons are understandable: Women really had been held back by bogus claims of essential differences. Now anyone who so much as raises the question of innate sex differences is seen as “not getting it” when it comes to equality between the sexes. The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science and the spirit of free inquiry.

Pinker points toward the coordinative functions of taboo. Adherence to taboos signals unconditional cooperation or an unconditional disposition to punish (usually the latter), providing a clear structure for coordination. Because family solidarity is, in most cultural contexts, so important, defecting on a family member has the character of a taboo. The taboo authorizes extreme reprisals and often requires altruistic punishment that is “irrational” in the technical sense, but which creates a payoff structure that is not a prisoner’s dilemma, i.e., in which it is not rational to defect.

So if I say, “Because she’s your sister.” And you say, “Why should that matter?” it is not that you’re asking an essentially illegitimate question, but that you have signaled non-commitment to the taboo-laden game structure, and thus identified yourself as a potential defector who must be given some additional reason not to defect. There may be some additional reason that is readily available. But insofar as speech acts are moves in the game, the correct response may not be to provide the additional reason, but to begin altruistic punishment immediately in an attempt to reinstate the more reliably cooperative game structure. So, it would not be unexpected, nor necessarily strategically irrational for “Why should I care that she’s my sister?” to be answered with a hard slap to the face.

But a slap in the face is, as Pinker puts it, “incompatible with the ideal of scholarship,” or rational inquiry. If the game is inquiry, then we have to question the taboos. One might worry that the entire family solidarity taboo structure is unjustified, especially given the cultural evolution of family structure. Fair enough. But then it is crucial to make it abundantly plain what game is being played. And if you attempt to play the inquiry game with your family, they might fairly suspect that your motivation to introduce the inquiry game is really to change the structure of the family game, which they will likely resist. So you end up in a third game, where the inquiry game is resisted in order to prevent the introduction of uncertainty into the family game by the rational undermining of stable norms.

(Now that I think of it in these terms, I realize that I played this third kind of game constantly with my mother in Sunday school. I would ask what I took to be a penetrating theological question, and she would resist answering on the terms of the game I had introduced, lest she undermine the norms of faith to which she was attempting to commit her son.)

Good but dry Frank Rich column on The Aristocrats, Deadwood, and our stiflingly censorious political climate.

In honor of Matt’s safe return from the heart of darkness, and in lieu of an actual blog post, I thought I would display my geographical experience of America:

bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now…

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

My fudge is that I say I lived in Virginia. I never had a residence there. But I worked in Virginia for three years, and spent as much time there as Maryland or DC during that time. Of course DC isn’t a state. But you knew that.

Regarding FEC Commissioner Brad Smith’s incendiary comments that McCain/Feingold could lead to a crackdown on blogs . . . I wonder if Smith, a sworn enemy of the speech restrictions he is supposed to impose in his capacity at the FEC (for which Smith gained the sworn enmity of McCain), is strategically baiting bloggers to help drum up a backlash against M/F.

Having seen Smith, who seemed to me a true blue libertarian, speak at an IHS seminar I ran a couple of years back, I think it’s pretty likely.

“I want to note that the growth of regulation generally, or more precisely, the growth of the administrative state, is itself smothering democracy in America, not only in its particulars, but in its general, ubiquitous presence.”

Bradley A. Smith, speech delivered at the Catholic University Law Review’s Election Law Symposium on September 23, 2000.

Let me just say, before it becomes illegal: Brad Smith for President!

Good thoughts by Brooke Oberwetter (in her new digs) about how a genuine debate about Social Security is almost impossible to have given the systematically misleading way economists and journalists insist on using language.

One of the things that makes talking about Social Security so infuriating is the fact that conventional ways of talking about government spending have no basis in reality (though that hasn’t prevented members of the reality-based community from using them).

Read the whole thing.

So, I’ve received several complaints that my individual index archive page is too wide. I would fix this, but it turns out that this might require my thinking about HOW to fix it, and I don’t want to do that. So, I’m hoping somebody will tell me how exactly, so I don’t have to think about it. Thank you.

[UPDATE: I meant the individual archive pages, the page where you go when you click the permalink. Thanks, Kipp, for you help. Sorry for being so dumb that I ask for the wrong thing.]