Articles by Daniel Rothschild
Daniel Rothschild was born in our nation’s capital but grew up in Houston, allowing him to play the insider and outsider cards as fit any given social situation. His popular writing, articles, and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Reason, Slate, the Daily Caller, the Chicago Policy Review, the Michigan Journal of Public Affairs, and Economic Affairs. Oh, and the What Cheer (Iowa) paper, the What Cheer Paper. He has appeared on television and radio in the United States and abroad, if by abroad you mean Canada.
Dan earned his bachelors degree in history at Grinnell College, where he was a weekly columnist for the student newspaper, taking various center-to-right positions with various degrees of genuineness. He believes he still holds both the record for the number of letters written to protest a column and the number of angry phone calls from administrators received in a one-week period (for separate columns). Dan earned his MA in modern British history from the University of Manchester and his MPP from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
By day, Dan is the managing director of the State and Local Policy Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he coordinates the organization's research on state and local economic policy. Nothing he says here has anything to do with his employer. Dan and his wife Jennie, a children's librarian, live with their dog Sassy in Arlington, Virginia.
Megan McArdle’s Amazon Meme
Megan McArdle posts an interesting idea:
A friend suggested this exercise: go to your Amazon orders page, and see what the very first thing you ordered from Amazon was. Memoirs of the turn of the previous century are filled with the family’s first automobile, its first water closet and electric lights. But I have no memory of my first interaction with an invention that is still reshaping how I live–more and more, Peter and I are now ordering groceries and toiletries from Amazon.
Turns out my first Amazon purchase, dated December 1998, was Plan 9 From Outer Space. On VHS. Looking at the invoice, I see I purchased it using my Yahoo! branded Mastercard.
Since memes are evolutionary, I’ll throw this in another direction, from purchasing to selling. Looking on eBay, it I sold my first item at auction in July 1998. Unfortunately, eBay doesn’t maintain the extensive back catalog of transactions that Amazon does, but if memory serves, I sold a Compaq 120 handheld computer.
Sometimes Right on Twitter
Just FYI: You can follow Sometimes Right on Twitter at twitter.com/SometimesRight. Also, you can follow our individual Twitter feeds here:
- David: twitter.com/davidrkirby
- Jerry: twitter.com/jerrybrito
- Dan: twitter.com/danrothschild
Productivity, consumption, and leisure
Tyler Cowen links to Matt Yglesias writing about the future of capitalism and social democracy. Yglesias writes:
When I was in Finland, where they have quite a mild right-wing, the thing that the conservative politician I spoke to seemed really upset about was the idea that Finnish kids are spending too much time in university. Too many students in college! Too many of them getting master’s degrees! Sometimes people would even take time off from their studies to travel! Here in the United States a huge swathe of the pundit class seems to deem it outrageous that the Social Security retirement age hasn’t increased as rapidly as average life expectancy. Don’t people know that they were put on this planet to work! How dare we, as a society, take some of our increased productivity in the form of an increased measure of liberation from our employers rather than more material possessions? The public, sensibly, doesn’t see it that way. When life expectancy grows faster than the retirement age, humanity is making progress.
Insert gratuitous Monty Python reference here. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
I can’t imagine any defender of capitalism and markets, except those of a strangely Puritanical variety, who name their children Cotton and Jereboam, actually holding the views that Matt seems to ascribe to defenders of laissez faire. This is straw man burning of the silliest order.
Nobody argues that it’s at all wrong to “take some of our increased productivity in the form of an increased measure of liberation from our employers rather than more material possessions.” Indeed, that is exactly why productivity gains matter in the first place. What we cannot do justly is take the productivity gains of other people (specifically, those younger than us) and channel them into our own liberation.
The reason that productivity growth — which capitalism achieves — is so important is that it allows for a greater basket of consumption. From an economic point of view, leisure is a form of consumption, whether taken in the form of a shorter work week, longer retirement, later age of beginning work, or shorter working hours. Productivity growth in an of itself is not a goal; the goal is to do more with less. That’s the essence of economics, the study of scarcity.
Liberalism allows us choice about whether we wish to channel marginal productivity gains into taking more leisure time or consuming more. If my productivity increases by 25%, I can either take Fridays off and maintain the same level of consumption, or keep my working hours the same and enjoy 25% more consumption. (And of course, I can do something in the middle.) Nobody argues that a five-year uptick in life expectancy means we should work five years longer. The relevant question is one on the margin, which Matt misses altogether.
The problem that I and many others have with the way that American entitlement programs are run is that the math doesn’t work out. It’s noble to save for retirement. Many people choose to work extremely hard for 25 years, living frugally, and squirrel enough money away to retire at 50. That’s their prerogative. What is not their prerogative is what is currently being demanded of Social Security: for inputs to remain more or less the same today and have outputs increase tomorrow. That’s about intergenerational wealth transfers, not increased worker productivity. (And lest we forget, wealth is a stock while income is a flow. A transfer of a stock is not the same as a flow.)
What proponents of raising the Social Security retirement age to, say, 67 are saying is this: Your retirement is going to be about 15 years longer than your parents’, so you should probably work 2 years longer to pay for it. That’s still a 13 year marginal increase in the length of retirement. Which is something brought about by productivity gains, which are notably lacking in the social democratic countries of Europe.
Rand Paul Money Bomb
Supporters of Rand Paul, Ron Paul’s son and a candidate for US Senate in Kentucky, are organizing a money bomb today. A money bomb is simple: get a large number of donors to make small or medium donations over the course of a few hours. The theory behind money bombs is that they generate large fundraising in a short time period, which generates news coverage, which in turn generates more fundraising.
I’d give even odds that Frank Rich will suggest that the use of the word “bomb” means that Paul’s supporters are violent, anti-government types whose money bombs are likely to become IEDs in the near future. [Addendum: I'll concede that organizing this event on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing is a bit tone deaf on the campaign's part.]
In more serious news, co-blogger David Kirby has an excellent analysis in today’s Politico with Cato Institute veep David Boaz about libertarian beliefs and the Tea Party crowd.
On Irony
Earlier this evening I tweeted “Glee version of Rock Bank or Guitar Hero would be over 9000 kinds of awesome.”
Very soon thereafter, I got two responses from friends. One said “Gasp! I need that. Brilliance.” The other said, “Please tell me you’re joking, Dan,” to which I responded, “Not in the slightest. But in fairness I don’t know the difference between what I like for real and what I like ironically.”
I was serious in my response to the second tweet. The line between sincerity and irony, at least for a certain segment of the Gen X and Gen Y set (read: hipsters and fellow travelers), has more or less disappeared. In 2001, Roger Rosenblatt of Time famously suggested that the 9/11 attacks spelled the death of irony. Chalk that up to the worst facepalm epic pundit fail since Clifford Stoll’s recently reunearthed 1995 pronouncement that the Internet was basically a bunch of hype. Irony is alive and well, and thank goodness.
I have been remarking for years that I no longer distinguish between that which I do sincerely and that which I do ironically. And I’ve decided that’s a good thing.
Fox’s Glee, to stay with the current example, doesn’t know whether it’s sincere or ironic. The show is so good because on one level it echoes life and a classic high school narrative, but on another level it drips with self-awareness and ridiculous plot twists, like the discovery that the school principal previously starred in an Air India safety video. It is neither straight nor comedic, it’s somewhere in the middle, and it veers rapidly between the two poles.
Because I have broken down the wall between sincere me and ironic me, I can like shows like Glee — which is silly, predictable, and as camp as a row of tents — and silly Europop and 80′s power ballads — without secreting them away as what we previously would have called “guilty pleasures.” The same goes for 30 Rock, another show conceived and executed with a Jimmy Fallon-esque degree of self-awareness. And my two Twitter respondents can think I like the show either ironically or sincerely, depending on how they choose to interpret it.
The result is an increased freedom to like what we want, regardless of social norms or fads — and an increased willingness to share our tastes with the world. The shield of irony allows us to expose our real likes and dislikes; people who question our tastes can write it off as irony. What’s fun is fun, whether it’s trendy or culturally significant or otherwise. The irony shield allows us to embrace anything and everything that we find fun, other people’s opinions be damned.
I close with the greatest definition of irony every given, not from Alanis Morisette, but from Baldrick.
Microloansharking
The New York Times home page is carrying a story this evening about how banks and financial institutions are entering the microloan business and — gasp! — giving loans to poor people in poor countries. But there’s a catch:
But the phenomenon has grown so popular that some of its biggest proponents are now wringing their hands over the direction it has taken. Drawn by the prospect of hefty profits from even the smallest of loans, a raft of banks and financial institutions now dominate the field, with some charging interest rates of 100 percent or more from their impoverished customers.
Without giving much in the way of details, other than dropping the name of Deutsche Bank, and some interest rates that appear high (though no comparison is given to what loan shark or grey-market credit rates are), the Times suggests that this once good-hearted enterprise is now falling drip to the tentacles of capitalism.
Folks, this is a feature and not a bug. One of the longstanding criticisms of microlending is that it isn’t scalable. If you or your foundation lend a few hundred dollars to a group of women weaving baskets in Bangladesh, and they grow their business, we all pat you on the back. But what’s the next step? What if this group wants to expand further, or move into related enterprises? How does microlending help them? Answer: it doesn’t.
The only way that microlending works to really help poor countries become rich is if it serves as a bridge to the formal financial sector, so that a $100 loan today becomes a $1,000 loan next year and a $10,000 loan the year after that. That’s growth. That’s enterprise. That’s meaningful poverty alleviation through capitalism. And that’s not something that the charitable microlending sector can accomplish, any more than charity can help me get a mortgage or a car loan.
We should be applauding international financial institutions, with access to trillions of dollars or capital, who get into the microlending business. That’s the only way this process works in any meaningful sense. Otherwise, all we’re doing is marginally expanding arts and crafts enterprises and leaving the poor dependent upon the charity of wealthy nations. That’s not meaningful development.
If microlending sharks are charging exorbitant interest rates, then presumably people will get their money elsewhere or choose not to take out loans. But the Times has an answer to that:
But poor borrowers are often too inexperienced and too harried to understand what they are being charged, experts said.
Ah, the poor are too stupid to engage in commercial transactions! They should only be able to get loans through well-meaning charities! Your new-caught, sullen peoples cannot be trusted in the worlds of contracts and commerce!
Perhaps — just perhaps — poor entrepreneurs know what they’re doing and are making decisions that are responsible based on their needs, skills, and goals. And perhaps allowing these people to participate in the international flow of capital and commerce that those of us in rich countries take for granted expands their opportunities and doesn’t make them victims.
The expansion of the international finance community into microlending is a development to be applauded. It means that poor entrepreneurs are increasingly moving into the formal economy, becoming banked, and developing relationships that will open their access to vast amounts of capital.
We should celebrate this, not condemn it.
McCain on Hayworth
This may not actually be an original concept, and it likely is not, but this is the first time I can recall seeing a candidate for a major political office creating a spoof ad for his opponent. The McCain people have put together a pretty funny take on JD Hayworth:
My Bill Easterly Moment
In his 2006 book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, economist William Easterly draws a contrast between “planners” and “searchers”; the former offer top-down, big-think approaches to economic development, while the latter think smaller and look for marginal improvements.
Chapter five of his book is entitled “The Rich Have Markets, the Poor Have Bureaucrats.” Many of Easterly’s critics suggest that this and other dichotomic language are, charitably, unhelpful or, unchartitably, evidence of a Rothbardian anti-state mentality. But in a story about his hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland, Easterly shows that he understands the value of effective bureaucracies — he just believes the evidence shows that smaller bureaucracies, more local to the people they serve, work better than large bureaucracies even if they are staffed with the best and the brightest:
I once had a pothole in front of my house in Takoma Park, Maryland. I got the city bureaucracy to fix the pothole in three easy steps: (1) I called my city councilwoman, Kathy Porter, and asked her to please have the city repait the pothole; (2) the next day, the Takoma Park Public Works bureaucracy was out there filling the pothole; and (3) actually, there was no third step. This worked because the city bureaucracy is accountable to elected politicians such as Kathy Porter, who is accountable to me and other voters. Kathy Porter is a Searcher. Sher built he political career in Takoma Park on responding to constituents.
I take the bus to get to and from work, not out of hair-shirted obeisance to our Gaia Mother, but because it’s cheaper — even with a few taxi rides a month — than buying a second car.
When Arlington Rapid Transit created a new bus route that runs less than a block from my house, I noted that it went for over a half-mile without a stop. It would be convenient for me, and many of my bus-riding neighbors, to break that stretch up with a stop in the middle. So I emailed the director of ART’s bus service, Steven Yaffe, cc’ing my county council member, suggesting they put a stop in.
Well late last month I got my stop. I asked, and the county responded. No hearings, no special elections, no 527s, no PACs, no lawsuits. While hardly life-altering, it’s shortened my commute by a few minutes, and it’s made my neighborhood a bit more transit-friendly.
Most political news headlines and analysis focuses on what happens in Washington, but local government can have a big impact on our lives — whether it’s efficient and effective or corrupt and bloated. Observers and thinkers from Tocqueville to Kirk realized that local policies tend to be more effective than national policies. Those who embrace the concept of subsidiarity and searchers in lieu of centralization and planners should consider that local governments are much different animals than national governments — and in many respects are much more important to our day-to-day lives.
New Winston Group survey of Tea Parties
The Winston Group released a new study of the attitudes of Tea Party members:
In one of the most extensive looks to date at just who Tea Party activists are, how they think, and the ideas that matter to them, the report found that 17% of the people polled considered themselves “part of the Tea Party movement” and more than four in ten Tea Party members said they were either Independents or Democrats. In three national surveys, done for New Models from December 2009 through February 2010, 57% of Tea Party members called themselves Republicans, another 28% said they were Independents, and 13% were Democrats. Two-thirds of Tea Party members identify as conservatives but 26% say they are moderate and 8% described themselves as liberal. The study also found Tea Party members are more likely to be male by a 56-44% margin, slightly older than the electorate as a whole and middle income earners. When it comes to issues, the research found that Tea Party activists espouse a strong economic conservatism. [...] In the February 2010 New Models study, 36% of Tea Party members name the economy and jobs as their top issue with national deficit and spending close behind at 21% — over twice as high as the overall electorate. However, when given the choice in the January survey, Tea Party members favored “reducing unemployment to 5%” over balancing the budget 63-32%, which closely reflects the overall electorate (64-32%). While Tea Party members prioritize job creation over deficit spending and tax issues, they value economically conservative policies because they view them as a means to reducing unemployment and improving the economy. Over 4 out of 5 Tea Party members (85%) say tax cuts for small business will create more jobs than increased government spending on infrastructure while the overall electorate prefers tax cuts by a more modest 61-31% margin.
Press release here; whole analysis here [pdf]. Unfortunately the survey doesn’t seem to include any information on education or demographics. But I’ll leave it to someone more knowledgeable about survey data than me to parse the details. (Via the Twitter feed of Nicki Kurokawa.)
Good for the goose…
Good thing a few nutty anti-war protesters never broke any windows, spat on people, espoused racist ideas, or compared the president to Hitler. Or attacked government buildings. Or shot fireworks at cops.
Because if they did, surely the New York Times editorial page would have inferred that the bad apples spoiled the whole bunch.
Really, Herbert and Blow and Rich? You sound as unhinged now as Michelle Malkin did just a few years ago talking about the anti-war movement. The difference is that Malkin is a provocateur, while you’re ostensibly Serious Columnists for a Serious Newspaper.
With everything that happened in the world this week — from the 
UK budget, to the Greek bailout, to Venezuela’s continued crackdown on dissent — the best you can do is all write the same column asserting that because a few crackers behave poorly at a Tea Party rally that everyone concerned about fiscal policy is racist?
It was obnoxious when right-wing provocateurs took a few examples of puerile or offensive behavior by anti-war protesters and used it to paint the entire (amorphous, decentralized) movement. But when the Gray Lady publishes three columns in a week using the poor behavior of a few tea party types to paint an entire (amorphous, decentralized) movement in a negative light, that borders on journalistic malpractice.
I suspect you know better, but decided it was too easy and fun to score a few quick points to avoid the temptation.
The GOP, standing athwart history yelling “A Gallup poll of 1,033 Americans indicates…”
I wrote earlier this week about why I thought that Republican rallying cries against the health care bill showed a decidedly anti-conservative willingness to allow angry mobs and whims reflected in public opinion polls to dictate public policy. Well, as we see now, they also rest on very shaky foundations.
A USA Today/Gallup poll released on Tuesday shows that a plurality of Americans, um, now support the bill:
By 49%-40%, those polled say it was “a good thing” rather than a bad one that Congress passed the bill. Half describe their reaction in positive terms — as “enthusiastic” or “pleased” — while about four in 10 describe it in negative ways, as “disappointed” or “angry.”
The largest single group, 48%, calls the legislation “a good first step” that needs to be followed by more action. And 4% say the bill itself makes the most important changes needed in the nation’s health care system.
So, I suppose in the GOP world of polling-led policy analysis, this must mean that Congress acted as an opinion leader rather than an opinion follower. And presumably, since today Americans now tell pollsters that they support the bill, it’s a fine thing. The conservative Media Research Center plays into the hands of the Administration by keeping the debate about polling numbers going. (Curiously, the post never used the phrase “margin of error.”)
Well done, GOP. You staked your claim against health care not on the merits of the bill but on the assertion that the American people didn’t want it. And that rationale has fallen apart just hours after the president signed the bill into law. The ink was hardly dry from the 22 ceremonial signing pens before your rationale for opposing the bill evaporated. You engaged this debate on process and procedure rather than substance. You lost on the first count and didn’t have much meaningful to say about the second.
The result is that the “repeal and replace” agenda is dead. Unless, of course, the polls shift again.
Either way, the GOP has decided to stand athwart history yelling, “A recent poll shows 53 percent of likely voters want history to stop or slow down!”
Inspiring.
A note to Jeff Bezos
Hey Jeff,
How’s it going? Long-time fan, first time open-letter writer. Huge fan of your operation, despite your sometimes silly abuse of patent laws.
And for the last few months, I’ve been a huge fan of your Kindle. It’s literally changed the way I read. Every Sunday, for instance, I cruise through the New York Times in a matter of an hour or so. I literally couldn’t turn the pages in the paper edition in that time. And the best part is it only costs seventy-five cents.
I’ve been reading more fiction, too, since I got a Kindle. Better fiction, as a matter of fact. When I get the idea I want to read something, I go to the Kindle store and get it. I start reading a minute or so later. So when I have the momentum to start a new book, I can start it more or less immediately. No more reading about it on Sunday, ordering it, receiving it on Wednesday, and never getting into it. Old-school folks might criticize this as being a result of our on-demand culture, but I think it’s great.
The Kindle is a great piece of hardware. And for those of us who like to settle in with a book, newspaper, or magazine for more than a few minutes at a time, e-ink is vastly superior to the backlit, have-to-move-your-finger-across-the-screen-to-change-the-page interface of the iPad. When I open a book or magazine on my Kindle, I forget in seconds that I’m not reading a traditional book.
I love the way that I interface with newspapers and magazines, especially; I can get a table contents for each section or leaf through article-by-article. And none of the “Continued on page A12″ nonsense. It’s all there in the most easy-to-read format imaginable. The newspaper metaphor stands in a way that newspapers on the web just don’t. For magazines, I love paging through The Atlantic or Reason on my Kindle.
But I’ve been wondering recently: Are you pulling a Pete Rose and betting on the opposing team? Are you heavily invested in Apple stock?
I ask because Amazon seems to have made some decisions to make the computer-based aspect of the Kindle suck as much as possible.
Take your recent Kindle for Mac application. The other day at work I used the app to open a book I’d bought on my Kindle device to search for a phrase I remembered. But guess what? No search. You don’t offer it on the Windows version either. What gives? I can’t imagine Apple releasing an app without search. I know you say you want to have it in a future version. But that doesn’t do a lot of good right now. How hard could it have been to put this functionality into your current version? And what’s with the font rendering on Macs?
I know, I know, you wanted to get something to market, and you’ll fix it later. But that’s the problem. For those of us between about 25 and 45, “get it to market and fix it later” is what we’ve come to expect from Microsoft’s storied line of mediocre operating systems. The usual MS MO seems to be to release something and then, a couple of service packs or a paid upgrade later, it finally works as advertised.
Your competition now is Apple. They don’t release half-ass products into the market (anymore). Later versions improve on previous versions, but they don’t release products in glorified alpha state. In other words, Steve Jobs wouldn’t pull the crap you’re pulling now with your desktop applications.
And the Kindle store on Amazon.com. Where do I begin? You’re getting more Kindle newspapers listed all the time. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how one is supposed to find out what papers have been added recently. Same for magazines. If you even have a page up in the Kindle store with these listed, I can’t find it. I don’t think it would break the norms of e-commerce to have a page highlighting new listings. That seems, well, pretty damn obvious.
And books. Oh, books. Through your Amazon Associates program, you give commissions to people like bloggers who link to Amazon books and get people to buy. Not so for the Kindle. The Amazon API is powerful, and if you gave people a profit incentive to use it to create new ways to display your content, much of what I’ve outlined wouldn’t be an issue, since people would take care of it for you. But you haven’t done this. Why not? You get between 30 and 65 percent of the purchase price of books. It’s not like paying a four percent commission to someone who came up with a neat way to sell your books would be a deal killer.
So, Jeff, I guess I’m a huge fan of your hardware. But your software is pretty mediocre. That’s kind of ironic, isn’t it, at least in the way that Alanis Morissette butchered that word? Don’t you think? I mean, Amazon built its reputation and business on the web. Hell, you defined what web commerce could be. You didn’t make your name in publishing. You certainly didn’t make it in hardware. But now you’ve built an incredible piece of hardware that has revolutionized publishing. And your web site that supports it, and the apps you’ve put together for desktop computers, are between bad and mediocre.
I really like my Kindle. I want to keep liking it. But in a couple weeks, you’re going to have to compete with something that claims to be a Kindle-killer. And I’m not sure that you’ll be able to compete.
So please, Jeff, don’t saddle me with an (admittedly lightweight, well-designed) obsolete antique that will fall into the where-are-they-now world of hardware. The Kindle isn’t the final word in e-book readers; it’s a proof of concept for what can be. Improve on it, not just in the hardware but in the web and desktop experiences. What you have out right now in hardware — even though Amazon doesn’t have its own line of fanboy-beloved operating systems and computers — can compete.
But it’s going to require a lot more innovation and work that Amazon currently seems willing to put into it.
Thanks for reading.
A republic, if you can keep it
Since the House passed the health care bill last night, sending it to the President’s desk for signature, many on the right have been up in arms about how Congress defied the will of the people. Protester outside the Capitol on Sunday shouted that the American people didn’t want the bill and that, as a result, it should be voted down.
They’re right in one regard: polls show that, while Americans are in favor of health insurance reform, they were roundly against the bill that the president will sign tomorrow.
But maybe if “we the people” stopped requesting the president’s birth certificate 50 times a month and instead picked up a high school civics textbook (offer not valid in Texas), we’d remember that America is a republic and not a democracy. (Except in California, where “we the people” can vote on any damn fool thing that comes to their minds. How’s that working out for you, California?)
Elections have consequences. Obama campaigned on health reform, and what passed yesterday looks strikingly similar in many respects to the Obama campaign’s proposal [pdf]. So, yes, in the only poll that matters, people did express a desire for what we got. As H.L. Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Is this a bad bill? Yes. Is it constitutional for the federal government to force everyone to buy a specific product as a condition of being alive? Not hardly. Is this bill the fiscally responsible action its backers claim? No, it creates a huge new unfunded entitlement. Was the math fudged? Big time.
There are plenty of reason to oppose this bill on principle — because it’s a bad bill, sets bad precedents, doesn’t identify a clear problem to solve, and has unknown consequences that will amplify the costs and attenuate the benefits. (I bet there will be a lot of recission and cancellation notices going out this week.) But policy decisions are not made by polls, they’re made at polls. Obama won a decisive victory in 2008, and this issue was at the root of his platform.
In 2007, when polls showed that the majority of Americans wanted to impeach Dick Cheney, that didn’t make it a good idea. Nor did the fact in 1998 that the majority of Americans did not want to impeach Bill Clinton make it a bad idea. (It was a bad idea on its merits.)
This health care bill is a bad idea. But because of what’s in it, not because of opinion polls. Rule by angry mob and opinion poll is hardly what the Framers had in mind.
The Kristof-Herbert Curve
Don’t get me wrong, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Nicholas Kristof, and I enjoy and learn from his writing on international affairs and human rights. His book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, coauthored with his wife Sheryl WuDunn, is tremendous. And he has reported from parts of the world that even seasoned travelers would be wary of visiting.
But his cheerleading for health care reform goes way over the top. Consider his column in this morning’s New York Times, entitled “Access, Access, Access.” Kristof argues that increasing access to something — it might be health care, or it might be medical coverage; the terms are used more or less interchangeably — for some group of people is so breathtakingly obviously the right and necessary thing to do that to voice skepticism is to be “on the wrong side of history.”
Yikes! That’s a good bit of Whig history for me to digest before my first cup of coffee. But let us proceed with his argument.
Kristof writes,
In short, great health care is often less about breakthrough technologies than it is about access. And for all the disagreements about President Obama’s health care proposal, let’s focus on this: it unquestionably would increase access, while its defeat would diminish access.
Stipulate for the moment that the proposal as adopted and signed would increase coverage by a significant amount. And we can know these benefits (again, stipulating). And let’s stipulate further that people do die sooner due to lack of health insurance, despite a lack of serious evidence for this assertion. But what of the costs?
Who knows. Kristof makes it through his entire breathless paean to reform without once using the words “price,” “cost,” or “payment.” Nowhere in his column do we get a sense that there any costs associated with the supposed benefits. Nowhere does he suggest that access for all at any cost necessarily precludes spending on other, perhaps more beneficial, priorities, whether private-sector investment in business and job creation (as conservatives like) or public sector spending to increase childhood literacy or reduce teen pregnancy (as liberals prefer). For a man who has traveled Southeast Asia cutting through the dense social, economic, cultural, and political webs that underlie child sex trafficking, and through the Horn of Africa delving into the causes of and solutions to maternal mortality, this is a stunning omission.
Even more stunning is a sentence in Kristof’s penultimate graf:
While countries with liberal social policies typically make abortion accessible and cheap, they make other elements of health care accessible and cheap as well — such as contraception and child care.
Parson? What does child care have to do with health care? Or are we just wrapping all the trapping of social democracy — universal health insurance, non-priced health care, free state-subsidized day care — into one big undifferentiated mess? The public debate has already confused and conflated health insurance and health care beyond recognition. Adding in a literal nanny state is just too much piling on.
Kristof’s fellow Times columnist Bob Herbert beats the drum regularly about unemployment, particularly persistent unemployment among young African-American males. The editorial pages of the Times regularly present full employment and universal health care as both good things that should, of course, be key policy goals.
The problem is that there’s a tradeoff. The benefits that Kristof and Herbert believe their public policy recommendations will achieve have costs. And while hardly a perfect correlation, an increase in Kristof-favored policies will in general cause a decrease in Herbert-favored policies. Just as the Philips curve was once thought to show the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment — reducing one meant increasing the other — the goals of these columnists are at odds.
So my question is: Where do they believe the US should fall on the Kristof-Herbert Curve?
