anonymous sources

While I don't see the point in protecting sources that have used the cloak of anonymity to lie in the past, it may be too much to expect the press to change its practice in this regard. For one thing, if protection becomes something the press can withdraw, it could become more difficult for the press to protect sources in cases where protection is needed and deserved. At that point, the press would no longer be saying, "We protect our sources," but, "We think this source deserves protection."

Fortunately, "outing" dishonest sources is not required to encourage honesty among background sources. If a "senior administration official" gives inaccurate background information, that fact could be reported with as much prominence as the original story. If such an official repeatedly gives inaccurate information, they could be described as an "sometimes unreliable senior administration official." If an administration or group has a track record of lying or twisting the truth, anonymous comments can be accompanied by disclaimers reflecting that history: "A senior administration official said that the moon is made of green cheese, but such statements from the administration have proven unreliable in the past."

Today, of course, our news outlets do little or none of this. Not only don't they expose dishonest sources, they don't expose their dishonesty, leaving the strong impression that they're more concerned with currying favor with those in power than in informing the public. As long as that perception persists, it will be difficult to generate public support for reporters such as Judith Miller.

the deft use of incentives

From the Red Cross:

Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

For those who haven't been following at home, I'll translate:

The top priority was to get people out of New Orleans, so the decision was made to prevent aid from entering the city. That would only have encouraged people to stay.

Perhaps the failure to provide aid wasn't merely incompetence. Perhaps it was policy. Perhaps people were dying in sewage and those in charge were more interested in providing incentives than food or water. It would be absurd if it weren't eerily reminiscent of arguments against welfare: "We shouldn't provide food, shelter, and medical care for the poor. Doing so will only encourage them to breed."

the no blame game

I visited the Volokh Conspiracy, as I sometimes do, and came across the following from Prof. Kerr:

I have absolutely no interest in assigning blame. My sense is that the crisis is sufficiently great that we need to be forward thinking right now. Assigning blame looks back; it's something you do when the emergency is over, and you have time to reconstruct what happened and see how you could do better next time.

It seems to me that those in power (and those siding with those in power) use this argument to avoid taking responsibility for their actions when things go wrong. I don't blame the President and the Republican Congress to score political points. I blame them because they have never been serious about governing the country. I blame them because they turned Homeland Security funding into just one more pork barrel. I blame them because they staffed FEMA with cronies. I blame them because they spent money where their friends were instead of where it was needed. I blame them because they were more concerned with finding a country to beat up to show that America was still Number One than with making our country safe.

But this isn't news. These things were true before 9/11, and they've been true ever since. I see little reason to give these guys a pass now, simply because their incompetence and lack of compassion has been on open, painful display. To say that I shouldn't blame them now is to say that now that their corrupt view of government has killed who knows how many people, I should be less angry with them than I already was.

I'll leave that forbearance for their fans, for their teammates who can't afford to believe that their leaders don't deserve the description, much less the job.

sometimes people die

It's small and petty of me, I know, but I can't help wondering whether the New Orleans levees would have gotten more attention had the New Orleans Member of the House been Republican, or had New Orleans voted 4:1 for Bush rather than Gore (assuming the Kerry and Gore votes were similar). There's been a lot written over the past few years about pork barrel politics and the way our governing majority has viewed federal funds as spoils to be distributed rather than tools to build a better country. These decisions have consequences. Sometimes people die.

the courage to follow

At Tapped, Mr. Goldberg describes the CW

that most Democrats are wary of turning against the war for fear that the administration will paint them as weak-kneed cut and run liberals.

I'm pretty sure he's got the CW right, and he goes on to ask whether that approach really serves Democratic interests.

I think the problem with the CW is much deeper than that. It doesn't take much courage to take the safe course and avoid being attacked. It doesn't take courage to keep your head down. It may take courage to send troops off to war (assuming you have enough compassion to care), but it takes precious little to let someone else send troops off to war, then support him in order to "support the troops."

It's hard (and depressing) to think that the Democratic leadership believes in the war. If they don't, however, the only words that come to mind to describe their behavior are "weak" and "cowardly." A lot of insults have been hurled at Cindy Sheehan, "weak" and "cowardly" aren't among them.

rally round the leader

Somerby and Krugman look back at the election that started it all, bemused but not amazed that so few Americans know who would have won with a complete recount. Somerby thinks Krugman lets the press off too easily. He's surely right, but I think he lets Gore and his team off too easily. It wasn't, after all, the press who decided which recounts to pursue. It wasn't the press who agreed that the most important issue was a smooth, timely transition rather than counting all votes cast. It wasn't the press who agreed that the American people were too infantile to live with some uncertainty over who the next President would be, and the government too fragile to manage a transition if all the new political appointees weren't vetted and ready to go.

When we consider the Bush Presidency, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it began with the bipartisan consensus that expediency and unity were more important than the truth.

the freedom to be ignorant

The NYT describes the Discovery Institute and its campaign to delegitimize evolutionary theory. One phrase in particular caught my eye:

the institute has in many ways transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between biology and religion.

Sometimes, I can't help wondering if the larger, largely unconscious agenda is to devalue the meaning of freedom itself. Academic freedom exists to promote intellectual progress by giving those with well-considered, supportable views a seat at the table, even if those views conflict with authority. The intentional use of academic freedom to undermine such progress is at its root no different than repressive forces using the mechanisms of democracy in order to seize power and suppress dissent.

activist judges

The Daily Howler cites this NYT op-ed as a possible well-founded definition of judicial activism. While the study is interesting (and Somerby is right to say that such studies are more useful than our normal discourse), the particular definition doesn't attempt to correct for political bias. If Thomas has voted to overturn more laws than Ginsberg, perhaps that merely means that Ginsberg agrees with more current law than Thomas, not that she shows more deference to Congress. If the bulk of current law were passed by legislatures more liberal than the conservatives on the court, we might expect less deference on purely political grounds.

While I doubt an attempt to rate individual laws as conservative or liberal would be productive, it might be interesting to look at the legislatures that passed the laws and/or the executives that signed them. Do the justice's records change when laws passed by the party that nominated them are challenged?

social security, one more time

The President isn't busy talking about how the Trust Fund doesn't exist, he worries about it going broke and the national catastrophe that will surely ensue due to all the broken promises. Policy wonks suggest raising the retirement age, but no one who works because they have to likes that idea. Every once in a while, we might want to ask what the fuss is all about.

The CBO makes that easy. By 2100 (the date of the largest gap in the table), social security will be spending 2% more of the GDP than it takes in. Revenues will be about 5% of GDP, and outlays will be about 7%, all substantial, perhaps worrisome sums.

But if a 2% SS deficit a hundred years from now should worry us, you'd think a 3.6% deficit today would worry us even more. After all, we don't really know what will happen in a hundred years. Today is real. Today, we're spending 3.6% more than we take in. If a potential future deficit of 2% is so ominous that we must act today, how come it is safe to delay action on our current deficit until tomorrow? Financing the 2% SS gap could be closed by raising revenues as a percent of GDP by 12% (16% to 18%) over the next hundred years, hardly a herculean task. Closing our current deficit would require raising our current revenues by 22% in a couple years. Which seems harder?

The CBO federal budget projection has some remarkable details. In 2012, for example, it shows us running a surplus. That requires a hefty increase in revenue, and I wondered where it would come from. In 2004, individual income taxes were 7% of GDP. In 2012, they're projected to be 10% of GDP, a whopping 40% increase. Corporate taxes relative to GDP drop over that period. It's hard to imagine such a scenario actually coming to pass.

what did hiatt really say?

From atrios, a pointer to elton, who characterizes Fred Hiatt's view in this op-ed as "Might makes right." I don't see it.

When Hiatt says

The premise of this highhandedness is that the United States is, on balance, a force for good in the world -- a superpower that uses its might not to subjugate others but to allow them to live freely. This is a premise that The Post's editorial page on the whole accepts -- to the dismay of many readers.

he does not say that the Post accepts high-handedness, but that the Post believes that the United States is, on balance, a force for good in the world. That's a judgement on the effects of US policy, not the propriety of the means. Indeed, his final point

Do we behave as well as we claim, as we should, as we expect of others? That's the beginning of the right conversation...

is that right is necessary to justify might, not the other way around.

Hiatt does not explicitly condemn US unilateralism, and it could be that such unilateralism is enough on its own to outweigh any good a nation could do, however spotless it's record. A policy may need to pass the "net benefit" test to be considered, but that test may still not be sufficient justification for the exertion of power. Hiatt's piece is silent on such issues, and it is fair to criticize that silence. Criticizing the claim that might makes right is not, because that claim was never made.

hero or traitor?

To be honest, until I saw the first TV promo ("Deep Throat revealed, but is he a hero or a traitor?"), it never occured to me that this was a controversial question. It is hard to believe that the country has changed so much over the last thirty years that this could be seriously debated. And yet it has, and it is.

Felt did not bring down President Nixon, the truth did that. Felt helped the truth come to light. Those who argue that he should not have done so are arguing that Nixon's crimes should have gone undetected and unpunished, that loyalty to the chain of command is more important than loyalty to the nation and its laws, that the highest value in the land is in fact fealty to authority.

funding the future

Mark Kleiman writes

the government could fund Social Security by paying down enough of its publicly-held debt now, while the OASDI surpluses are rolling in, to be in a good position to borrow later, when OASDI is running deficits. That's not technically "funding," but it's the functional equivalent, just as a family can save by paying down its mortgage.

I don't think future retirement funding can be analyzed in purely financial terms, and I don't think the family analogy applies.

The problem with analyzing the future economy in purely financial terms is that money is only a call on future goods and services. The root cause of the Social Security "crisis" is that we will have more retirees per capita in the future than we have today. There will be fewer people producing goods and services, and more people consuming them. Saving money won't help that, it only means that there will be more money chasing that production, a good recipe for inflation.

Contrast this with the family mortgage. When a family pays down a mortgage, enabling future borrowing against their house, they're preparing to call on resources outside the family. If they later take out a loan, the money they obtain can be used to draw on production outside the family. By saving (whether by reducing debt or increasing assets), they increase their access to production. When we all (as embodied by the government) create or retire debt to ourselves, it doesn't change our ability to call on the resources of others.

Not all of the government's debt is owed to ourselves, of course. A lot of it is held by foreign investors and foreign governments. If we were to pay that down, we might indeed be able to cash in our advantageous financial position to ease the demographic burden. The problem there, however, is not the government budget, but the trade deficit. When we run trade deficits (as we've done for decades), those who sell to us goods reinvest the money we send them in our economy. If we refused to sell them government bonds (by running budget surpluses, for example), they'd be forced to buy stocks, real estate, etc. Either way, the more we sell today, the less we'll have to sell tomorrow. The national equivalent of paying down the mortgage would be running trade surpluses: accepting fewer goods from abroad today so that we'll have the resources to get the goods we need tomorrow. I don't see any sign of that happening.

What other alternatives are there?

We could invest today in the things we'll need tomorrow. That's a nice thought, but private investment today would chase today's returns, meeting the needs of today's society rather than the need's of tomorrow's aging society. Retirement housing seems like a fairly safe long-term bet, for example, but consider the difficulty of building retirement housing today, intending it to sit idle until it's needed. Medical systems would be even more difficult to pre-build because of the strong likelihood that they'll be obsolete by the time they're needed. It's difficult even to pre-train medical staff with an aging focus without patients to pay their salaries or provide them with experience. In a market economy, demand creates supply and supply nearly always trails demand. Why would the infrastructure to meet the needs of an aging society be any different?

We could try to reduce the trend towards inequality in income distribution. I wrote about this in detail months ago. The loss in productivity (and the implied loss in consumable goods and services) are roughly equal to the income shifted to the wealthiest of society over the last 20-30 years, and occurs over the same time period. Perhaps we can address tomorrow's problems by reversing the trend.

We could try to eliminate the demographic bubble by importing workers, skilled ones if we can't educate enough of our own to fill the skilled positions. This probably isn't practical due to the sheer scale of the problem. Even if it were, some of the trends in this area are worrisome. The easiest way to import skilled workers, after all, is to bring them here for graduate school and get them to stay. Over the last few years, foreign enrollment in grad schools has fallen.

Modest increases in the retirement age would eliminate the problem at a fiscal level, but would create inequities in fields where sixty-five is already old. Social Security isn't free of such problems today, but that's not a reason to make the problem worse.

Any others come to mind?

tribalism and democracy, red and blue

Elections don't seem to have solved everything in Iraq. As a sign of how bad things are, consider that officials are trying to reassure people by downplaying "the possibility of outright sectarian war — characterizing some of the recent violence as tribal feuds..." It's not (yet) a sectarian civil war, merely violent anarchy. Quite reassuring.

Long-time readers of this blog will remember my befuddlement when the world celebrated the Iraqi elections as the dawn of a new nation, and my bemusement at the silence of the blogs. I won't claim to have foreseen today's problems, but I couldn't figure out how an election without Sunni participation would strengthen the country. The possibility that it would leave the Sunnis more isolated and alienated than before seemed equally likely.

But of course, I didn't see any evidence that Saddam was about to engage in undeterrable nuclear blackmail. I didn't even see compelling evidence of WMDs.

Meanwhile, back in the homeland, Newsweek prints some old news and gets blamed for starting riots. "Newsweek Lied, People Died" rings out across the blogosphere. August Pollack notes that, "This isn't even not caring. It's beyond not caring. It's taking pride in not caring."

He's right, of course. It's important to take pride in your team/tribe. That which makes our team strong is good. That which makes our team weak is evil. These days, however, the team isn't the country, it's a color. Are you red or blue?

secure elections, electronically

At eschaton, avedon writes

I join with tech-savvy supporters of democracy everywhere in saying that there is only one appropriate means of making elections secure: Paper ballots, hand-counted on the night, in public.

I hope it doesn't disqualify me as tech-savvy, but I think there are ways to make e-voting more secure, reliable, and open than paper voting. The problem with today's e-voting systems is not that they're electronic, but that they're black boxes. The vote enters the box and disappears. It doesn't have to be that way.

To avoid fraud, a voting system needs to be auditable. Ballots, once cast, must be retrievable. Their content must be tamperproof. Ideally, any voter should be able to check whether their ballot has been counted and counted correctly. Paper ballots achieve the first of these, but as the Florida chads showed, they don't achieve the last two.

Non-secret ballots achieve all three. Voters cast ballots, and since the association between voter and ballot remains, voters can themselves audit the results of elections. They can see their ballots as well as everyone else's. Tampering with votes is nearly impossible (no one ever worries about voter fraud in Congressional votes). Intimidation and retribution, unfortunately, are not.

Suppose, however, that a voting system could be designed that assured privacy, while making ballots themselves public and allowing individuals to audit their votes. Such a system would be strongly resistant to tampering, even if electronic. An electronic system would, in fact, make tampering more difficult by making it easier for more voters to verify their votes. If half the population did so, tampering with a single vote would lead to detection half the time.

What might such a system look like? Let's start with the ballot itself. A ballot is a series of boxes, some checked, some not. A ballot with 100 candidates and 50 propositions (I live in california) has 200 boxes, each with a potential value of 1 or 0. A 200-digit binary number. 25 bytes. In the 2004 presidential election, about 120 million votes were cast. That's 3GB without compression, or about one DVD's worth. Most ballots would be significantly smaller. Any state election would fit on a CD-ROM. Any county's results could be downloaded quickly over the net.

Those are, of course, only the ballots themselves, not the identifiers that would allow voters to verify their results. How would those come to be? Here, things start to get a bit technical.

How would voters verify that their ballot is in the public record? Give each voter a secret key. When they vote, combine that key with the ballot and pass the resulting string of digits through a cryptographic hash function. One key property of such functions is that it is extremely difficult to generate a given hash result without knowing the hash inputs, making it infeasible to generate a pair for a particular voter without access to the key. Append the result of that hash function (not the key) to the ballot. Hash values used for such verification purposes are commonly referred to as digital signatures. Voters wishing to verify that ballots with their choices and their key are in the database can do so by locating ballots with their signature. They can also verify that their key has not been used only once.

Since every ballot can be (at least potentially) verified and the total number of ballots must match the voter rolls (the same mechanism we use today) attempts to change results run a high risk of detection. In a 10,000 voter election where only 1% of voters verify their ballots, an attempt to move results by 1% would be detected about two-thirds of the time, and the detection rate rises dramatically with increases in either the rate of ballot checking or the number of voters in the election.

So, what would be the problems with an approach like this? The main ones appear to be false attacks on the integrity of the system, and the initial verification and distribution of completed ballots. When any voter can challenge the accuracy of an election by claiming that a valid ballot hasn't been counted, it is important to ensure that their claims can be verified, that they did in fact cast the ballots they claim are missing. Ballot verification and distribution is important because the "ballot" the voter will take home is merely a long number. Voters will not be able to look at the number and determine whether it accurately reflects their votes, nor will they be able to remember the number for later verification.

The same technique used to verify that a ballot exists can be used to prevent false attacks on election results. Voters add signatures to their ballots so that they can verify that ballots they created are in fact recorded properly. The voting system can add signatures to ballots to ensure that ballots voters present for verification do in fact represent votes cast. In this case, since the key used to mark ballots valid must remain private, but it should be possible for anyone to verify a ballot, the signature should be based on a public key system.

Completed ballots can be distributed to voters using any printer and verified using digital scanners, the same techniques used today when people print movie tickets or airline boarding passes at home. Such systems encode a number in machine readable form, then validate that number when the ticket or pass is presented. In the voting case, the printed ballot could be verified by a scanner and the results checked by the voter, before the voter left the polling place.

One objection to a system of this type is that the anonymity of voting might be degraded. While the system itself keeps ballots anonymous, voters can reveal votes themselves, raising the prospect of vote selling or intimidation. While this is a legitimate concern, it should be recognized that this prospect exists in any system where monitors do not verify the secrecy of the voting process. Any system that allows people to vote from their homes, for example, allows people to reveal their votes to third parties. Even systems where people cast ballots in carrels then carry them to vote readers allow some amount of vote sharing.

Nowhere in this discussion have I described the security of the voting machines themselves. Instead, the goal has been to make the integrity of the overall system as independent as possible from the integrity of the voting machines. Instead of attempting to verify that a voting machine correctly records a voter's intent, for example, verification occurs externally, using an independent system. Verifiers could, for example, be provided by independent election monitors rather than those in charge of the election.

Is this a complete solution? No. Distribution of secret keys to voting machines for the purposes of signatures is a potential problem. Are there holes? Almost certainly. I've never seen a communication protocol that achieved security without extensive review. A system based on open protocols and public records, however, can get that review. The closed, secretive systems being deployed today cannot.

the FEC vs the internet

Atrios writes, wrt FEC blogging regulation:

It's ridiculous that some people desire that a medium which requires no money in which to participate - for which there are no real gatekeepers - be effectively more regulated than radio/tv/print/etc.

but it seems to me that adding gatekeepers is precisely the point. In traditional media, the first gatekeeper is cost of access. That keeps out the riff-raff. Once the riff-raff have been excluded, regulators try to maintain some order among those that remain, as much for their benefit as anyone else's. When you remove the initial barrier, the entire system breaks down. The biggest losers are the ones who dominate traditional channels, and since regulations exist for their benefit...

discrimination against conscience

Pharamacists complain that they shouldn't be required to participate in procedures they disagree with. Senators declare that opposing the appointment of judges well outside the mainstream to lifetime positions is religious discrimination. They're hardly alone. Police and military services discriminate against pacifists. Jury selection discriminates against death penalty opponents. People working in corporations struggle with conflicts between personal ethics and job responsibilities every day. No one's coming to their defense.

The aim of all the special pleading isn't to prevent discrimination against people following their consciences. It's to create a privileged conscience. It's to say that there is a particular set of beliefs that should be privileged everywhere, and that those who hold those beliefs should be allowed to impose their beliefs on those around them at any time or place.

corruption, policy, and politics

Matthew Yglesias writes bout the importance of linking personal corruption to policy in the DeLay case:

They're not free marketers who happen to take bribes on occassion. The policymaking is fully continuous with the corruption.

Both regular readers of my blog will recall that I've written about this before. Personal corruption makes good TV, but it's not really the point. Proof of personal corruption wouldn't make DeLay bad for the country. He'd be bad for the country even if he were Mr. Clean. As long as he was on their side, he'd still get money from corporations defending their interests. If he wasn't, he wouldn't get much no matter how corrupt he was.

Those looking to purchase an agenda probably prefer to buy from the less corrupt. True believers make better spokesmen. They're more reliable. They don't end up in court or hauled before ethics committees. They don't drag their donors' names through the mud with them.

Even without petty corruption, candidates who accept large donations are more likely to represent the interests of their donors than not. Donors support candidates because they expect them to advance an agenda, and they tend support agendas that advance their interests. A candidate's donor list tells you more about what that candidate will do than months of press reports, and the longer a politician's career, the more predictive the donor list will be.

taking it to the streets

I found my way through eschaton to hullabaloo, to read musings on the nature and relevance of protest. I found myself thinking of the deaf ear turned towards those who took to the street to protest against a war driven by the powerful, and the attention given those who besieged a hospice, a man, and his dying wife. I thought of economic summits held far from the public eye, for fear the public would become unruly. I thought of inaugural parades in front of angry crowds, with those crowds barely noticed by news cameras. I thought of the protests against Syrian occupation in Lebanon, and of the protests in its favor. I thought of the protests that brought down the government in the Ukraine. I thought of tanks in Tiananmen Square.

alas, poor darpa

Mark Kleiman mourns DARPA, rightfully so. The NYT article he references describes some of the details. It's a shift away from an open research model to a defense industry model. Even without an explicit shift of dollars from universities to the private sector, the imposition of defense industry accounting practices and restrictions on publication would have driven most university researchers out of the mix.

It is difficult to find a non-cynical explanation for the shift. The result will be neither more efficient nor effective. The need for secrecy is no larger today than it was during DARPA's cold-war heyday. Security did not become more important when the Soviet Union fell.

Cynical explanations, on the other hand, are easy. Defense contractors make campaign contributions. They support the administration. They get more money. They support the new policy:

Despite the complaints, some pioneering researchers support the changes being driven by Dr. Tether and say they are necessary to prepare the nation for a long battle against elusive enemies.

"There are pressures and demands on Darpa to be relevant," said Robert Kahn, a former Darpa administrator who is now president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va. "People think it should stay the same, but times have changed."

When war is peace, all things are possible. Any policy can be justified as long as it purports to keep the bogeyman at bay.

inexplicable! inconceivable!

Kevin Drum looks at a new study that appears to show that actual malpractice costs have risen little over the past 15-20 years, and then says:

If doctors were smart, they'd team up with trial lawyers instead of fighting them. Together, they could probably agree on both genuine malpractice reform (as opposed to bogus and ineffective "caps") and insurance industry reform. Instead, they allow themselves to be suckered over and over again by insurance industry lobbyists. It's inexplicable.

It's not inexplicable to me, but then I have the advantage of growing up in a doctor's family and hearing his conversations with friends. They didn't view the rest of us as peers, at least with regards to medicine. We were simply not qualified to hold them to account. Lawyers, who as a group most often did so, were the enemy. Medicine was seen as an inexact art, bad outcomes as inevitable, and accountability as little better than second-guessing.

There are exceptions to this. Atul Gawande has written of the advances made in anesthesiology (death rates reduced from 1 in 5000 operations to 1 in 200000) that occurred when the speciality stopped viewing itself as a craft and began systematic efforts to reduce bad outcomes, in part due to financial pressure from malpractice claims. Anyone who's answered questions before a procedure ("How much alcohol do you consume? Do you use illegal drugs?") has seen the results. Dr. Gawande himself wasn't sure how to apply the same process to a field like surgery, but as long as doctors oppose systematic data collection for fear of adverse personal consequences, the data needed to drive the process won't even exist.

In some ways, I'm quite sympathetic to the doctors' view. Medicine is an inexact science, and tort law a terrible mechanism for addressing inevitable bad outcomes. When such outcomes occur, however, someone has to clean up the mess--pay for additional medical care, support the medically indigent and their dependents, etc. Without better alternatives, lawsuits are inevitable, and I don't see doctors leading the search those alternatives.