Isner and Mahut in a prisoners dilemma

Daniel Rothschild
June 23rd, 2010
Culture

So the longest Wimbledon match in history is currently underway. As I type, Isner and Mahut are tied 56-56 in the last set; they’re tied 2-2 in previous sets.

According to reports (and common sense), the two men are exhausted and grimacing with each serve (though they seem to have rallied when they crossed the 10-game threshold). My guess is that they arms will be completely shot by this for the next few days. As a result, whoever wins this match will be at a severe disadvantage going into the next round, and will probably be so exhausted that he will lose. In other words, assuming winning the tournament is the goal and one that’s much more prized than merely advancing to a second round, it’s a classic prisoners’ dilemma. The dominant strategy by each player is to keep playing, even though every game further diminishes his likelihood of winning the next round, and therefore taking them out of contention for an overall win. In other words, every additional set that Isner and Mahut play decreases their chances of making it to the third round and thus reduces their combined expected utility.

Would there have been a way for them to have reached an optimal solution earlier on? Obviously sportsmanship precludes any kind of (spoken) match fixing, but mightn’t there be a rule change allowing a set to stop before it becomes a death match? For instance, before a match begins, players could agree to opt out of the normal rule and set a limit on the maximum number of sets they’ll play in a final, fifth match before the need to win by two games is eliminated. Setting this rule from the beginning of a match allows the players to circumvent the prisoners dilemma; whoever wins the match is more likely to win the tournament than in the absence of such a rule.

Efficiency concerns are seldom used in sports; we prefer the epic struggles and Pyrrhic battles. But that doesn’t obviate a little sideline thought experimentation.

Thanks, George W Bush, for the BP escrow fiasco

Daniel Rothschild
June 18th, 2010
Politics

In today’s New York Times, David Sanger analyzes President Obama’s expansive use of the presidency not as a bully pulpit but to act as planner/shareholder/dad-in-chief:

But President Obama’s successful move to force BP to establish a $20 billion compensation fund that the company will have no voice in allocating — just a down payment, the president insisted — may have been the most vivid example of what he recently called his determination to step in and do “what individuals couldn’t do and corporations wouldn’t do.”

With that display of raw arm-twisting, Mr. Obama reinvigorated a debate about the renewed reach of government power, or, alternatively, the power of government overreach. It is an argument that has come to define Mr. Obama’s first 18 months in office, and one that Mr. Obama clearly hopes to make a central issue in November’s midterm elections.

The real issue here isn’t — or at least shouldn’t be — the “size and scope” of government, to employ that chestnut. What’s really frightening about the way that Obama sees his role as unconstrained by law or regulation on what he can or cannot do. If the president decides that a private company should establish an escrow fund with the federal government, he doesn’t need a law or regulation to set up how this works. He just needs what Rahm Emanuel calls “a power other presidents have used — you call it jawboning.”

It may make every bit of sense for companies that drill offshore to, in the case of an environmental catastrophe, have an escrow fund managed to pay the victims of their recklessness, carelessness, or bad luck. And as Richard Epstein argued, BP doesn’t deserve to have its liability capped.

But if this is the case, there should be some kind of legal or regulatory means for addressing this. A whim of the president is not, in a country that can meaningfully be said to be governed by the rule of law, sufficient basis for this. And by putting the money in an “escrow fund,” it gives the illusion that there’s some kind of contractual or due process mechanism at play here. There isn’t. Procedure matters in a liberal democracy; getting to the “right result” isn’t enough.

Of course, Obama couldn’t do this if his predecessor hadn’t teed up such a perfect shot for him. So well done, Republicans. Your insistence that the “unitary authority” of the president allowed him to imprison and execute at will has been reapplied from real people to the legal persons that are corporations. Nothing Obama’s doing is inconsistent with the Bush doctrine on presidential power. The target has merely shifted. Heck, it’s really just a continuation of existing Bush administration policy: Hank Paulson did the same thing when forcing banks to take TARP money, though at least TARP could hide behind the fig leaf of congressional action.

Somewhere from his lair on Skullcrusher Mountain, Dick Cheney is smiling. And remember, libertarians told you so.

International soccer and fiscal policy

Daniel Rothschild
June 17th, 2010
Economics, Politics

The list of countries that qualify for the World Cup is always a motley one. There’s Brazil playing against just-got-in and didn’t-register-properly North Korea, which Radley Balko suggested fielded a side with eight Kim Jong-Ils. Over in Group  E there’s defending world champions Italy, we’d-rather-be-playing-rugby New Zealand, Slovakia (motto: “No, sorry, you’re looking for Slovenia; they’re in Group C; no bother, it’s a common mistake”), and Paraguay (notice that every country ending with “guay” qualified for the World Cup).

Qualifying for the World Cup is a big deal and source of national pride (except in the United States). Could this pride be leveraged for macroeconomic ends? I have a modest proposal.

The Stability and Growth Pact limits the ability of Eurozone countries to run excessive deficits and incur excessive debts. Supposedly. As we’re seeing in Greece, it doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job at this. And Greece is far from the only country to openly flout the Pact.

Would World Cup disqualification work any better? That is, what if FIFA or the regional governing bodies (like UEFA) only certified for World Cup participation countries that adhered to some basic rules of fiscal discipline, keeping their deficits in check and debt below some reasonable percentage of GDP?

It wouldn’t be unprecedented. After all, in club soccer, teams are regularly disciplined for financial irregularities with point deductions and even outright relegation. This seems to be a more-or-less effective way of keeping team management on the up-and-up. The same might well hold for nation-states.

Obviously this isn’t foolproof, and surely there will be countries that game the system. But it would at least allow the exclusion of countries like Greece who threaten the financial stability of an entire continent. To mix my sport metaphors, Greece deserves some time in the penalty box. That need not be executed just by diplomatic means.

Since the endogenous costs of reckless fiscal policy don’t seem to effectively dissuade countries from marching into the abyss, perhaps the damage to national pride accompanying disqualification from international soccer’s biggest quadrennial tournament would prove more effective.

Ask not for whom the watch beeps

Daniel Rothschild
June 15th, 2010
Culture, Random

I’m at a conference in Philadelphia today with about 100 people in an auditorium. Around two in the afternoon, someone’s watch made a “beep beep” sound, and it took me a minute to realize that this was a sound marking the hour and one that I hadn’t heard in years.

Do you remember in the 1980s and 90s when a chorus of digital wristwatches emitted perfunctory peels every hour on the hour? I realized today that this seems to have completely disappeared. Why is this? A few hypotheses, ranging from the blindingly obvious to the more subtle (and therefore less likely correct):

1. People are less likely to wear watches. This is the most obvious theory. Some estimates show that watch sales have fallen off over the last few years, but not by the order of magnitude that would be required for the virtual elimination of the hourly watch chime. Even if 50 percent fewer watches were sold this decade, and stipulating for the moment that watches are not durable goods, that still doesn’t explain it. Anecdotal evidence suggests that cell phones and iPods have rendered the wristwatch obsolete (at least as a method for telling time), but they haven’t gone the way of the buggy whip yet.
2. Preferences have changed towards analog wristwatches. This makes some sense; since we have the time in our pocket (plus calculators, contacts, appointments, memos, and all the other snazzy things our watches used to do before PDAs and cell phones), watches perform only two functions: telling the time and signaling status.
3. People no longer want to be told when the hour strikes. What explains this change in preferences, however? Why would this have changed?
4. People never wanted hourly chimes to begin with but watches came with them turned on by default. Call this the Sunstein and Thaler theory.
5. People still want hourly chimes but don’t want to wear watches to get them. This makes little sense since presumably cell phones could be made to chime hourly, or developers would create an app. (Oh wait, they did.)
6. My sample has changed. I’m in a professional environment now rather than school and college. Since I graduated from college about the time that cell phones became ubiquitous, I have a difficult time disaggregating a number of social trends from this other revolution.

Granted, this is a completely pedestrian observation. But it is remarkable that, at least from my perspective, something as ubiquitous as the hourly watch chime seems to have disappeared overnight, and without much fanfare.

War + Lithium = Democracy. The Aristocrats!

Daniel Rothschild
June 13th, 2010
Economics, Politics

The United States has discovered a trillion-dollar trove of metals in Afghanistan:

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberries.

Referring to a country as “the Saudia Arabia of” anything hardly augurs well for its future since Saudi Arabia is, well, a theocratic petrostate whose rulers virtually imprison a group of foreign workers whose numbers total about a third of the kingdom’s population and whose native population is subject to the whims of a fascist religious police that, among other feats, murdered fourteen schoolgirls in 2002, prohibiting them from leaving a burning school building because they were not sufficiently veiled.

Afghanistan is not a country that has always been an anti-modern failed state, but one that was at one time, not so long ago, a relative symbol of progress and liberalism in the Muslim world. So moving to being the Saudia Arabia of central Asia isn’t really a great step forward.

Perhaps Afghanistan can join Nigeria or Venezuela in the list of countries whose natural resources have done so much to initiate prosperity, growth, and opportunity. But “central Asia’s Nigeria” doesn’t really have much of a ring to it.

For the umpteenth time: natural resources are not an unalloyed good that move a country from poverty to prosperity. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the rule of law and favorable institutions have a lot more to do with it than minerals. Given that the Soviets, then the Taliban, and now the US are presiding over an effectively broken institutional climate in Afghanistan, the discovery of mineral deposits is nothing to cheer about. In many ways, it’s a step backwards. At least for the people of Afghanistan.

Technically, isn’t it the Rikrok defense?

Daniel Rothschild
June 9th, 2010
Random

Josh Levin write at Slate on the state of what he’s termed “the Shaggy defense”:

A few weeks ago, Virginia Lawyers Weekly noted that U.S. District Judge Jackson Kiser cited the Shaggy defense in denying a defendant’s summary judgment motion. In the case at issue, Preston v. Morton, a man was struck by a tractor trailer while installing traffic lights. The accused driver’s defense: It wasn’t me.

From a footnote to the judge’s denial of summary judgement:

The term refers to a song by the artist Shaggy called “It Wasn’t Me.” In the song, a man’s girlfriend catches him “red-handed” in the arms of another paramour. When asked for his advice, the singer advises the man to tell her “it wasn’t you.” In the present case, I do not mean to suggest that the case against Defendants is as clear cut as the case against the adulterer in the song (as part of the song’s “charm” is the absurdity of such a claim by someone in the narrator’s situation). I use this term merely to illustrate the defense—claiming the offending party was someone else.

As usual, pop culture references in judicial opinions are good for a chuckle, even if they don’t do much to promote the majesty of the law.

And not to quibble: but shouldn’t it be the Rikrok defense? Certainly the advice to issue repeated denial in the song was proffered by Shaggy, but he was acting as counsel to Rikrok, who was instructed (and refused) to employ this stratagem.

June 8 poll closing times

Daniel Rothschild
June 8th, 2010
Politics

A blogger at Firedoglake posts a helpful chart of closing times for states having primaries today, with links to the states’ elections bureaus or equivalents. I haven’t checked it but none of the commenters suggested it was inaccurate. I’ve pasted it here:

To represent it another way, here are states by closing time (all times Eastern):

7 PM: South Carolina, Virginia

7:30 PM: Arkansas

8 PM: Maine, New Jersey

9 PM: South Dakota (?)

10 PM: Iowa, Montana, Nevada (?)

11 PM: California

Times are all over the place in North Dakota; nobody will close a poll until I blow this whistle.

If anyone has any corrections, please post them in the comments.

Democratizing the takedown of BP

Daniel Rothschild
June 7th, 2010
Culture, Politics

The New York Times, always fresh to break a scoop, reports on the BPGlobalPR Twitter feed, which for the last several weeks has been offering up scathingly hilarious takes on what is quickly taking the mantle of America’s largest-ever environmental disaster:

The parody site is updated throughout the day, offering a combination of “everything is going exactly according to plan” P.R. speak, macabre humor and occasional glimpses of genuine outrage.

Over the last week, BPGlobalPR boasted of a deal on “blackened shrimp” at BP gas stations, linked to the photographs of oil-soaked pelicans with the out-of-character postscript “warning: truly heartbreaking” and spoke of how “we’ve modestly made modest changes to this modest gulf.”

Beyond its followers, BPGlobalPR benefits from retweeting, becoming grist for other Twitter feeds. On Saturday, this cynical packet — “Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no — profits, image, then safety, but still — it’s right up there” — was bounding its way across the Internet.

But, the Grey Lady warns you, just because something is on The Twitters doesn’t make it legitimate:

Knowing who’s who on Twitter has been a challenge since the beginning: the basketball great Shaquille O’Neal created his own Twitter feed, with the insistent handle The_Real_Shaq, after someone was pretending to be him. The impersonations had become so problematic that Twitter created “verified accounts” last year assuring followers that the person controlling the account was the real deal.

Far be it from me to cast aspersions on people who use Twitter for comedic ends. Having received an order to cease and desist from a foreign government for allegedly impersonating one of their ministers on Twitter, I am no citadel of righteousness when it comes to tweets.

But the Times buried the lede here. It’s well-known that on Twitter, as elsewhere on the internet, satire (in its better forms) and fraud (in its black hat variety) run rampant. Only in the final paragraphs does the article get to the transformative aspects of this:

While satire has always been with us, certainly longer than public relations executives have been, the Internet is democratizing the process, said Miriam Meckel, a professor of communications in Switzerland who is a fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard studying the impact of Twitter and social media services on journalism.

And that is the real story here. Bursting the bubble of a pompous company is nothing new; being able to do it and have 11 times as many followers (that is, market share) as the object of your derision is what’s new. Blogs, social media, Twitter, et cetera provide myriad ways for normal folks to, if not comfort the afflicted, at least afflict the comfortable. And there are few better ways to hold power — whether in the form of political leaders, firms, or self-appointed social saviors — to account. No longer can a powerful, politically connected company like BP attempt to spin and manage its way out of wrecking hundreds of miles of coastline. This is changing brand management in a way we don’t, I think, fully understand.

It’s not that the facts are getting out. It’s that the Zeitgeist is being established independent of any entity with which BP can directly plead, cajole, or threaten. We are crowdsourcing the establishment of the snarky, ironic conventional wisdom. And in many ways, this is a much more powerful thing than the rise of mere fact-reporting bloggers.

It’s not just about reporting, which is how Web 2.0 (for lack of a better term) has largely been discussed. This isn’t the democratization of information. It’s the democratization of the takedown, the skewering, the needling. This is not the news media being disintermediated — it’s the professional satirists in the vein of Mencken and Rogers and Jon Stewart being replaced by amateurs, and lots of them. It makes it harder for any big entity or brand to remain hallowed and righteous for very long.

On a more prosaic level, we saw this as well with Helen Thomas over the last week. After declaring her wish for the Levant to be Judenfrei, she tried to back out and apologize. And in an earlier era, she might have been able to control the news cycle long enough for it to be buried. The facts here were never in dispute; she was caught on a Flip camera, so chalk that up as a victory for Web 2.0 as we understood it five years ago. But over the weekend she was so badly skewered by thousands of satirists (sample Twitter #helenthomasmovies titles: “10 Things I Hate About Jews,” “Goys Don’t Cry”) that today she was forced to resign from, well, whatever it was that she did.

The BP oil spill is the first major national event where the bad guy in question is subject to lampooning not just from a satirical elite but by anyone with the material and the gumption to set up a Twitter account, or hell, create a funny hashtag. Democratizing the news was a step forward. Democratizing our skepticism towards all form of power is an even greater step.

David Frum on the Bilderberg Group

Daniel Rothschild
June 7th, 2010
Politics

The Bilderberg Conspiracy apparently met this weekend in Sitges, Spain. What? You’ve never heard of Sitges? That’s because the Bilderbergers made it up. It’s not a real city. They even went so far as to make up a Wikipedia page for it; there’s even one in Catalan! They also invented a backstory for it and got a whole bunch of gay people to claim that it’s a great destination for a beach vacation. Now that’s thorough, though it doesn’t fail the descamisados who know the truth.

Once again, I was not invited. However, David Frum spent some time at the Bilderberg Group in the 1990s as a guest of Conrad Black. (Presumably, Lord Black was not in attendance this year, as he’s currently in a federal prison in Colorado, where he seems to be having a fine old time.)

From Frum’s short essay:

I don’t mean that Bilderberg meetings are boring. They aren’t, not especially. They are precisely as interesting as any other conference that focuses on global economic data, the urgency of European integration, and the ever-rising menace of populist conservatism in the United States. I cannot recall ever hearing anything said in off-the-record conversations that the person speaking would not have said on-the-record….

The idea of Bilderberg as a shadow world government is rather funny. Bilderberg itself demurs, on grounds that the group only hosts discussions, never adopts resolutions or anything like that. But that’s not the real rebuttal. Unlike Davos, Bilderberg is a membership organization: Most attendees return every year. Over time, this practice has given Bilderberg a distinct yesteryear quality. You were much more likely to meet an “ex” this or “former” that than anyone in office today. Guests too tended to reflect the interests and enthusiasms of prior decades. You wouldn’t meet Bono at Bilderberg. (Or rather – you wouldn’t have in the 1990s. Maybe you would now!)

For this reason, already it was true in the 1990s that Bilderberg felt itself being overtaken by glitzier competitors, especially the World Economic Forum in Davos. Nobody would ever describe Bilderberg as glitzy. Meetings were decidedly low-tech: panel discussions, not powerpoints. The group met in comfortable but hardly sumptuous resort hotels. Meals were served buffet style, with the group’s patron, the Queen of the Netherlands, carrying her own plate and joining the queue.

It was precisely the anachronistic quality of Bilderberg that always fascinated me most and that looms largest in my own memory.

Scene: I’m in the hotel bar after a Bilderberg session in Belgium. I get into conversation with an elderly fellow-attendee, a wealthy German businessman. Then: “You know, I was a Nazi.” Weren’t a lot of people? “Oh yes. But I was especially ardent. I volunteered for service in Russia.” What happened? “My parents were aghast. They thought the war was madness. They were influential people – and so my father got me an assignment as military attaché in Portugal. That’s the only reason I’m alive now.”

Steve Horwitz hits some dingers

Daniel Rothschild
June 3rd, 2010
Culture

I usually find sports metaphors for non-sporting activities to be strained at best, trite at the mean, and misleading at the worst. Especially when discussing trade and economics, which are non-zero sum games, sports metaphors (where one team inevitably wins and one loses) are lacking.

But Steve Horwitz hits some dingers over at Coordination Problem with some observations about the lessons from last night’s terrible call that cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game (what would have been the third of the season) and what they can tell us about public relations and the rule of law. Steve’s a Michigander, so this has got to be especially painful for him since no Tiger has ever pitched a perfect game.

Steve writes:

The reaction by almost everyone after the game was really classy.  The Tigers bitched a bit, but didn’t go off the rails.  The umpire admitted he just flat out blew the call.  No excuses, just “I screwed up and cost the kid a perfect game.”  He also apologized personally to Galarraga.  This is an outstanding lesson in how to handle a huge public mistake:  don’t try to cover your tracks, just admit you screwed up and apologize to those affected.  As frustrated as I am by the mistake, I totally admire Joyce for the way he handled it, and Galarraga too, who gracefully accepted the apology.

A great lesson for PR and for life generally. Unfortunately, firms and individuals almost always do the opposite: run, dissemble, cast aspersions, cast blame, and hide. That’s why “getting out in front of it” is so important; it’s the right thing to do and it looks best in the long run. Steve continues:

If I were Bud Selig, the commissioner, here’s what I would do to try to serve some rough justice.  He can’t overturn an umpire’s call on the field, as that sets an awful precedent.  But what he could do, I believe, is have the official scorer for the game change the play from a hit to an error.  That would still deny Galarraga the perfect game but at least give him a nearly-as-cool no-hitter, and it would do so without overriding the ump’s judgment call.  Just because the batter was ruled safe, doesn’t automatically mean it was a hit!

If I were Bud Selig, I’d drown myself in a bucket of my own spittle for two decades of unrelenting debasement of our national game, but that’s neither here nor there. Steve’s absolutely right on this: the rule of law and precedent are more important than correcting a one-time injustice. You can’t have baseball commissioners overriding calls on the field willy-nilly; baseball is a sport of rules and not of men (unlike some other sports). Steve’s remedy seems like the best available one.

Hitch-22 out tomorrow

Daniel Rothschild
June 1st, 2010
Culture, Politics

Christopher Hitchens’ long-awaited memoir Hitch-22 comes out tomorrow. (Fortunately, the publisher, Twelve, has seen fit to release it same-day on Kindle.) Here’s a partial list (below the fold) of what the reviewers are saying about it. I have it on pre-order; I only wish it had come out in time for the long Memorial Day reading weekend.

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Japan is building a moon base

Daniel Rothschild
June 1st, 2010
Random, Technology

Japan is building a moon base. Actually, it’s building robots that will build a moon base.

An ambitious $2.2 billion project in the works at JAXA, the Japanese space agency, plans to put humanoid robots on the moon by 2015, and now official backing from the Prime Minister’s office says the Japanese could have an unmanned lunar base up and running by 2020.

Key to all of this, of course, is the robots themselves, and who better than the Japanese to dream up and realize the kind of intelligent, self-repairing, multitasking bots that will be needed to fulfill such a mission.

As currently envisioned, the robots that will land on the lunar surface in 2015 will be 660-pound behemoths equipped with rolling tank-like treads, solar panels, seismographs, high-def cameras and a smattering of scientific instruments. They’ll also have human-like arms for collecting rock samples that will be returned to Earth via rocket. The robots will be controlled from Earth, but they’ll also be imbued with their own kind of machine intelligence, making decisions on their own and operating with a high degree of autonomy.

When the robots control the moon, what’s to keep them from weaponizing it and using it to destroy Earth?

What are you waiting for? Why haven’t you purchased robot insurance yet?

Robert Reich wants to nationalize BP

Daniel Rothschild
June 1st, 2010
Politics

Robert Reich wants to nationalize BP’s American operations until President Obama can use his Magical President Powers to stop the oil leak.

What’s interesting is Reich’s evidence that this is kosher:

If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s North American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

So, in other words, because we’ve already done it a couple of times, there’s no reason we can’t do it again. It turns out that in politics maybe one occurrence does make a pattern. Merely suggesting that something isn’t a precedent doesn’t make it so.

So what happens when BP succeeds?

Daniel Rothschild
May 27th, 2010
Politics

This morning Karl Rove has an op-ed (can we call it a column yet?) in the Wall Street Journal forwarding the increasingly silly and increasingly CW talking point that the BP oil spill is Obama’s Katrina:

As President Obama prepares to return to the Gulf Coast Friday, he is receiving increasing criticism for his handling of the oil spill. For good reason: Since the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up on April 20, a lethargic Team Obama has delayed or blown off key decisions requested by state and local governments and left British Petroleum in charge of developing a plan to cap the massive leak.

Now the slow-moving oil spill threatens Mr. Obama’s reputation, along with 40% of America’s sensitive wetlands. Critics include some of his most ardent cheerleaders, who understand that 38 days without an administration solution is unacceptable.

Obama officials have it backwards: They talk tough about BP’s responsibilities but do not meet their own responsibilities under federal law. They should not have let more than a month go by without telling BP what to do. And they should avoid recriminations against their partner in solving the problem until after the leak is sealed.

Rove’s analysis is good political point scoring, to be sure, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for a serious argument. Let’s think for a moment about the counterfactual: Obama spent the last month in BP’s war room, personally directing the operation, failing to use his Magical President Powers to fix the leak. Then Karl Rove would have written this:

As President Obama enters his fifth week embedded with BP’s senior management, he is receiving increasing criticism for his handling of the oil spill. For good reason: Since the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up on April 20, a hyperactive Obama team has interfered with and second-guesses every British Petroleum decision, making it impossible for the company to develop a plan to cap the massive leak.

Now the slow-moving oil spill threatens Mr. Obama’s reputation, along with 40% of America’s sensitive wetlands. Critics include some of his most ardent cheerleaders, who understand that 38 days without a engineer-led solution is unacceptable.

Obama officials have it backwards: They talk tough about the federal government’s responsibilities but do not allow BP to do what it knows, which is manage oil production. They should not have tried to take control of the situation from day one. And they should avoid recriminations against their partner in solving the problem until BP has really been given a chance to try.

Moreover, most of Rove’s criticisms have little to do with the president, but rather a big, complicated, inflexible, and opaque federal bureaucracy — the same bureaucracy that mucked up the response to Katrina, leaving political egg on Bush’s face.

Over at NRO’s Corner, Jonah Goldberg is a voice of reason:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m usually singing from the same “It’s Obama’s Fault and We Know It” songbook. But I just can’t bring myself to agree with the folks who think that the BP spill is a major indictment of Obama. He may have handled the politics  of this thing badly, by which I mean the P.R., but unless someone can explain how Obama could have “taken over” and fixed this faster, I think a lot of the criticism is overboard. Not all of it; it sounds like Bobby Jindal has some legitimate complaints. But the notion that B.P. isn’t motivated to cap this thing as quickly as possible and so therefore Obama needs to lean on BP harder is nothing short of crazy talk. Obama could have been on vacation for the last month and I’d bet the tempo of the BP operation wouldn’t have been one minute slower.

What I wonder is whether there is a wrinkle in Goldberg’s argument that’s not the fault of the administration but of Congress. For weeks, BP has been trying to stop the leak with dome caps, junk shots (do they know that that phrase means?), and top kills. Nothing’s worked so far, but eventually something will. Maybe this week, maybe next; the flow will be staunched or at least contained.

At that point, every Congressional committee with jurisdiction over energy, public lands, commerce, and the environment will dragoon BP officials before them and ask sanctimoniously, “Why didn’t you do [insert whatever procedure ends up working] first?” Whichever engineer and manager organized the working solution will be hailed as heroes, while the developers of junk shorts and top hats will be publicly mocked.

To what extent does this change BP’s incentives to cap this spill? Who knows? Despite an ostensible $75 million cap on liabilities facing BP, it seems to be a bipartisan consensus that they’ll end up paying more, since we’re not really so much into the rule of law right now.

Whatever the result, though, it’s untoward to have Congress utilizing 20/20 hindsight to second-guess technical decisions after the fact. But at this point, I suppose we should be used to it.

Arthur Brooks’ “The Battle”

Daniel Rothschild
May 25th, 2010
Culture, Economics, Politics

Arthur Brooks, the polymath president of the American Enterprise Institute, today released his newest book, The Battle. It’s one barnstormer of a defense of free markets and a very lucid indictment of Brooks’ ideological opponents. Short, to the point, well-researched, and simple without being simplistic, this is a must-read for anyone who’s been bemoaning what for the last few years has looked like the death of intellectual conservatism.

Brooks’ thesis is that America is in the midst of a culture war, one that splits citizens who support markets and free enterprise from those who distrust it and want to fundamentally transform what America was, is, and will be; Brooks refers to the former as the 70 percent coalition and the latter as the 30 percent coalition, citing a plethora of data suggesting that Americans are split roughly 70/30 on the questions underlying the two different worldviews. (This echoes, but I think is emphatically different from, Grover Norquist’s “leave us alone coalition” and “takings coalition” division of the right and left.)

The difference between these groups has nothing to do with God, guns, and gays; rather, it’s about free markets and free enterprise. (To be sure, Brooks never touches on social issues.) Nor is this merely a consequentialist or Benthamite argument; Brooks writes that the “culture war between free enterprise and statism is not [about] material riches—it is [about] human flourishing. This is a battle about nothing less than our ability to pursue happiness.”

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