WHICH IS A BAD INCENTIVE STRUCTURE: Politicians Turn Problems Into Power.

FINGERS CROSSED: Bye bye, BBB?

Ahead of President Joe Biden signing an infrastructure bill into law on Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “Now, this bill, as significant as it is, as historic as it is, is part one of two.”

This is wishful thinking. Progressives have gotten played on supporting the bill, known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework. They reneged on their vow to not vote for the BIF unless the larger social spending bill came up for a vote at the same time.

I predict that while BIF is now law, the Build Back Better Act will fail to pass Congress.

With BIF enacted, neither Sen. Manchin nor Sen. Sinema has any incentive to support the $1.75 trillion bill that would drastically expand the welfare state. The progressives gave up the leverage they had in terms of votes in the House of Representatives. Manchin or Sinema can now safely come out in opposition to BBB.

Even before BIF passed the House, months after the Senate had done so, Manchin already expressed reservations about the BBB. His concerns included paid family leave provisions and how the BBB would affect inflation. And, right now, inflationary concerns are only growing. Meanwhile, Sinema has come out in opposition to certain tax increases, limiting how revenue could be raised under BBB.

Previously: Nice Infrastructure Bill You Have There, Joe — Too Bad It Might Have Destroyed Your Presidency.

YOU WENT FULL TRUTHER, PAUL. NEVER GO FULL TRUTHER: Krugman: Trump has incentive to allow a terrorist attack.

Still though, think of the infrastructure rebuilding possibilities, Paul! They’d be almost out of this world!

TARGETING THE JEWS SEEMS POPULAR IN NEW YORK LATELY: New York Governor Cuomo: “I’m going to say to the orthodox community tomorrow if you don’t agree then we will have to close down your religious institutions.”

Religions that behead people don’t get this kind of treatment. Maybe that’s a bad incentive structure?

THEY DO IT PRECISELY BECAUSE THE CRAZY LEFT SCARES THEM. IT’S EXACTLY BY THIS MECHANIC THAT ALL THE UPPER CLASS BECAME COMMUNIST IN EUROPE AND THEREFORE MADE COMMUNISM A POSITIONAL GOOD. BECAUSE THEY WERE TERRIFIED COWARDS. IT’S NOT LIKE THE RIGHT RIOTS, LOOTS AND THREATENS THEIR LIVES:  Corporations Grovel to Black Lives Matter.

Of course, they might perhaps want to think about the incentive structure they’re creating, now it’s becoming obvious this is an existential fight.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?

In a 1990 paper, “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive,” Baumol argued that the level of entrepreneurial ambition in a country is essentially fixed over time, and that what determines a nation’s entrepreneurial output is the incentive structure that governs and directs entrepreneurial efforts between “productive” and “unproductive” endeavors.

Most people think of entrepreneurship as being the “productive” kind, as Baumol referred to it, where the companies that founders launch commercialize something new or better, benefiting society and themselves in the process. A sizable body of research establishes that these “Schumpeterian” entrepreneurs, those that are “creatively destroying” the old in favor of the new, are critical for breakthrough innovations and rapid advances in productivity and standards of living.

Baumol was worried, however, by a very different sort of entrepreneur: the “unproductive” ones, who exploit special relationships with the government to construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will, in the process stifling competition to create advantage for their firms. Economists call this rent-seeking behavior.
…
In Baumol’s theoretical framework, depressed rates of entrepreneurship aren’t the culprit for periods of slow economic growth; rather, a change in the mix of entrepreneurial effort between the two kinds of entrepreneurship is to blame — specifically, a decline in productive entrepreneurship and a coincident rise in unproductive entrepreneurship. But is this what’s actually happening in the U.S.?

Well, for starters, we and others have documented a pervasive decline in the rate of new firm formation during the last three decades and an acceleration in that decline since 2000. In fact, we found that by 2009 the rate of business closures exceeded the rate of business births for the first time in the three-decades-plus history of our data.

Washington is diverting ever more of the country’s creative energies away from innovation and towards “pull peddling.”

Atlas Shrugged was not supposed to be a how-to manual.

SO IT’S NOT JUST A LOCAL PROBLEM: BBC: Child sexual exploitation is happening in a “number of towns” in different parts of the country, according to the author of a damning report into abuse in Rotherham. Are the perpetrators all Pakistani Muslims?

On Facebook, Jason van Steenwyk comments: “This doesn’t happen without some serious enabling. I would start rooting out people within the bureaucracy… public employees of whatever ethnicity… for being part of a ring set up to enable this.”

UPDATE: From the comments: ″Her Majesty’s subjects are surely observing that the more bloodthirsty and savage they are, the more respect they’ll be given. I hope Her Majesty’s Government takes a sober look at the incentive structure they’re putting together.” Yeah, I’ve made this point, too.

WANT YOUR RELIGION PROTECTED FROM DESECRATION? ACQUIRE A REPUTATION FOR VIOLENCE. Teenage girl sentenced to a year in jail for throwing bacon on a Scotland mosque. Hey, I don’t create the incentive structures, I just point ’em out.

AS YOU SOW, SO SHALL YOU REAP: French Catholics Destroy Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Well, when you cave so easily to Muslims’ complaints about blasphemy, you send a signal to everyone else about what kind of behavior is rewarded. May you have joy in the incentive structure you’ve created.

UPDATE: How do we know it wasn’t an inside job?

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments: “Be a religion that violently responds to blasphemy, and you are respected. If not, you are mocked.”

MATT WELCH: Just Admit It, Newspapers: You’re Scared of Muslims. “No, Martel/Brauchli, you pulled the cartoon because your fear of Muslims outweighs your commitment to free expression, period.” May you have joy of the incentive structure you’re creating, O guardians of societal values. Because you’re going to be living with it.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg emails: “So who are the ‘Islamophobes’ again?”

RYAN SAGER: The rationality of political violence. Of course, I’ve been warning for a while about the incentive structure that’s been put in place.

MORE ON THE GEERT WILDERS BAN: The lesson to me is that if you want freedom of speech, then, like the Muslims in Britain, you must make the authorities afraid to bother you. If you seem harmless, you will be silenced at the demand of those whom the authorities fear. Once again, I note that this is an incentive structure that the British authorities will likely come to regret.

IF YOU WANT RESPECT, YOU HAVE TO TERRORIZE PEOPLE A BIT, I GUESS: Germany OK’s Hamas Flags at Rallies… Rips Down Israeli Flags.

Who knew that the occasional bombing or beheading was a prerequisite of free speech? But, okay, message received. May the Germans have joy of the incentive structure they’ve created . . . .

UPDATE: A reader is reminded of Tom Kratman’s Caliphate. “Recent events in Germany are eerily similar to the decline of Europe portrayed in Kratman’s novel. Yikes.” Yes, but remember, Barack Obama hasn’t been sworn in yet. Things’ll turn around once that happens.

JAPAN: Slacker Nation? Young Japanese Shun Promotions. In a modern industrial society, it’s possible to live quite well without climbing the ladder much. That may be a problem, in time.

UPDATE: Michael Greenspan notes that this is what happens when you don’t have enough income inequality.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And Greenspan seems to be right. Another reader emails:

It’s not just Japan. I work for one of the big 3 aerospace/defense companies at a Los Angeles area location, and though I wouldn’t say it’s nearly as evident as in Japan, young workers in our industry are asking the same questions. We have no hope of achieving the same standard of living as the droves of retiring Boomers and Silents, and the 2% raise differential afforded by a promotion simply isn’t enough of an incentive to work 20-30% more hours a week.

If the industry paid overtime, or offered significant bonuses to rank and file employees (bonuses are only available to upper management), a lot of young engineers would respond enthusiastically. In fact, we’ve asked the company to do these things in recent employee forums. We’d all like to buy homes in the area and raise families here, but the older workers own all the real estate, and most of us assume that we’ll give things a few years, but get out of the area once we need to settle down. It’s simply too expensive to live in a metro area like L.A. Since the incentive structure doesn’t offer us hope of achieving the same lifestyle as the older employees, we don’t see much reason to devote our lives to these companies. As I said, the 2% differential doesn’t make a whole lot of difference, so why bother with the extra stress?

There you have it.

FREE SPEECH UPDATE: You still can’t write about Muhammad. Will other religious groups take the lesson that violence works? Because, in a world of the spineless, it does, and at very low cost. Thanks, guys, for establishing this incentive structure.

UPDATE: I am charged with “cultural relativism.”

Part of the Islamic belief-system is the proposition that one who insults Muhammad should be killed. That is why Muslims so easily resort to threats of violence against those who say things about Muhammad that they don’t like. No sect of Christianity teaches that the one who insults Jesus should be killed. In fact, they all teach that one should be patient and charitable with opponents. That is why Christians do not generally resort to threats of violence against those who say things about Jesus that they don’t like. There are nuts in every group, of course, and that’s why I say “generally,” but there is no sanction in the core teachings of the religion for such behavior. And that’s why Reynolds’s earlier assertion that “sooner or later, you know, fundamentalist Christians are going to pick up on this lesson, engage in similar behavior, and make similar demands” is almost certainly false. The most virulently fundamentalist Christian can find no sanction in Jesus’ teaching for the murder of his opponents any more than anyone else can.

It does not make every Muslim a terrorist to point this out, and it isn’t bigoted to do so, either. It is simply to state a series of facts — and if anyone wishes to try to prove that the facts I have asserted here are false, I welcome the challenge. Meanwhile, the relativism of Glenn Reynolds and so many others continues to hinder our response to the jihad threat.

Well, I believe in evolution, memetic as well as physical, and I think that if violence works, more people will use it, and the religious doctrine to justify that will follow. Am I right, or is Robert Spencer right? The world had better hope that Spencer is, since our spineless powers-that-be seem determined to conduct the experiment. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

MORE: Reader Dave Warner emails:

Robert Spencer writes:

“The most virulently fundamentalist Christian can find no sanction in Jesus’ teaching for the murder of his opponents any more than anyone else can.”

Maybe no one expected the Spanish Inquisition, but I would certainly hope that someone might remember it.

Yes, I get arguments that “no true Christian” would do this sort of thing but these seem like variants of the “no true Scotsman” line.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP:

Muslims have complained over a police advert featuring a puppy sitting in an officer’s hat. A police force has apologised to Islamic leaders for the “offensive” postcard advertising a new non-emergency telephone number, which shows a six-month-old trainee police dog named Rebel. The German shepherd puppy has proved hugely popular with the public, hundreds of who have logged on to the force’s website to read his online training diary. But some Muslims in the Dundee area have reportedly been upset by the image because they consider dogs to be “ritually unclean.”

Sadly, you don’t have to. It’s amazing what a combination of PC multi-culti guilt and a credible threat of violence will get you, though I’m guessing that it’s mostly the credible threat of violence that’s doing the work here. Nice incentive structure they’re setting up.

OUCH: Europe ‘needs 75 years’ to catch US.

The Association of European Chambers of Commerce in Brussels warned that the transatlantic gap had widened yet further in the past five years by all key measures, despite the pledge by EU leaders at the 2000 Lisbon summit to transform Europe into the world’s “most dynamic knowledge-based economy” by the end of the decade.

The EU-wide umbrella group, known asEurochambres said the EU’s overall employment rate was still stuck at levels attained by the United States in 1978, chiefly due to an incentive structure that discourages women from working and prompts early retirement by those in their fifties.

It found that the European Union’s research and development levels were achieved by America as long ago as 1979, while the lag time on per capita income is 18 years.

“It will take the EU until 2072 to reach US levels of income per capita, and then only if the EU income growth exceeds that of the US by 0.5pc,” the study said.

I don’t think that regulating country line dancing is moving them forward any. . . . They’re way ahead of us on perks for bureaucrats already, though. And that’s saying something!

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: “A Belarus court sentenced a newspaper editor Friday to three years in prison for reprinting a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked worldwide riots when it was initially published in a Danish newspaper.” When American celebrities complain about crushing of dissent in America, remind them that this is what it really looks like.

And if you don’t want your religion dissed, you might as well start blowing people up. Obviously, it works. Nice incentive structure, there.

A DOUBLE STANDARD AT GOOGLE-OWNED YOUTUBE:

The Google property has recently banned the popular atheist commentator Nick Gisburne. Gisburne had been posting videos with logical arguments against Christian beliefs; but when he turned his attention to Islam (mirror of Gisburne’s video by another user), YouTube pulled the plug, saying: ‘After being flagged by members of the YouTube community, and reviewed by YouTube staff, the video below has been removed due to its inappropriate nature. Due to your repeated attempts to upload inappropriate videos, your account now been permanently disabled, and your videos have been taken down.’

Christians who want similar consideration from Google will presumably have to start blowing things up and beheading people. As I’ve noted before, it’s quite unwise to create this kind of incentive structure. I thought the Google people were supposed to be smart.

UPDATE: Here’s a Christian blogger who nonetheless supports Gisburne:

I, like many of the greatest minds of the last 2000 years, think that Christianity is a perfectly reasonable and logical thing to believe. Still, I am appalled that Gisburne’s YouTube account has been deleted and his voice silenced.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Gisburne has a new account, and posts a video on the subject.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh comments:

YouTube is a private company that is entitled to choose what it carries; and while using YouTube is a convenient way to effectively get your views out, you can certainly get them out even without YouTube. Nonetheless, consumers are also entitled to criticize YouTube and other media organizations — organizations that make a living off our vibrant marketplace of ideas — for refusing to carry certain important viewpoints because some find those viewpoints offensive.

Indeed.

MORE: Further thoughts here: “Needless to say, this sounds familiar.”

THE ISG: No Jews Allowed! “Arabs, Persians, Chinese commies, French obstructionists, Russian assassination squads. But no Jews. Even though Israel is the only country to be required to make specific concessions — return the Golan Heights, etc. Indeed, insofar as this document has any novelty value, it’s in the Frankenstein-meets-the-Wolfman sense of a boffo convergence of hit franchises: a Vietnam bug-out, but with the Jews as the designated fall guys.” (Via Newsbeat 1).

UPDATE: No Kurds, either:

Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani has angrily rejected the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group in the United States and warned of “grave consequences” if there is any delay in deciding the fate of the oil-rich region claimed by his people. Mr Barzani, president of the 15-year-old autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq and a staunch ally of the US, also criticised the ISG for not visiting his region, saying that was a “major shortcoming that adversely influenced the credibility of the assessment”.

Looks like the sellout isn’t selling.

ANOTHER UPDATE: XRLQ emails: “The message is clear: if you want the west to acknowledge you, issue fatwahs and blow stuff up.”

Yes, and that’s a bad incentive structure to create. God help the French if the Israelis take this lesson to heart and decide to out-Arab the Arabs. For that matter, God help Jim Baker.

Plus, this amusing comment:

If James Baker ran a bipartisan Blue-Ribbon panel tasked with saving social security, his commission would conclude that no real progress on social security was possible until Israel ceded the Golan Heights to Syria and made whatever concessions necessary to mollify Hamas.

When, exactly, did Baker turn into Jimmy Carter?

MORE: Meryl Yourish thinks it’s all a cunning plan: “James Baker has managed to draw quite a lot of ire away from Bush and towards himself. Why, you’d almost think it was deliberate. . . . I think we’ve all been had, and that the Iraq Study Group was never meant to be taken seriously.”

WHOOPING COUGH IS BACK: “State laws that make it easy for children to skip school-required vaccinations may be contributing to whooping cough outbreaks around the country, a study suggests. . . . Compared with stricter states, those with easy exemption policies had about 50 percent more whooping cough cases, according to the study. Also, about 50 percent more people got whooping cough in states that allowed personal-belief exemptions, compared with those allowing only religious exemptions, the study found.”

I wrote a column on a related topic a while back. It’s here. Bottom line: “Drugmakers get sued for defective products; ‘activists’ and sensational journalists do not. If I were to start a drug company, and peddle a drug with no more evidence of its safety and efficacy than anti-vaccine activists and their media allies had to peddle their approach, and if as many people were made sick, or killed, as a result, I’d probably be in jail now. So where’s the accountability for the people whose bogus claims and hysterical coverage led to this situation? Nowhere in sight. With that sort of an incentive structure, we’re lucky that we’re not in worse shape.”

UPDATE: Reader Paul Strasser emails:

Take it from an adult who got whooping cough two summers ago. It sucks, big time. My son first got it from some kid at school whose parents believed that the vaccine was dangerous. The kid got it, and transferred it to my son, who then gave it to me. It was god-awful. But even worse was listening to my son cough so loud, so hard, then actually have to gasp and gulp for a breath of air – every few minutes you think your child is suffocating. Every time he did this (and he was a trooper, bless his soul) I silently swore a blood oath against those damn parents who think that vaccines are evil. No, the parents were inconsiderate, stupid bastards.

Yes, both my son and I had our vaccines.

The vaccines, alas, aren’t perfect — and because of that, it’s important that enough people be vaccinated to prevent transmission. If you don’t have enough vaccinated people to produce “herd immunity” then the level of protection is lower for everyone, even those who get the shots.

IF THEY HAD A HABIT OF BLOWING THINGS UP, they wouldn’t face this problem:

BRITISH Jews are facing a wave of anti-Semitic attacks prompted by Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Synagogues have been daubed with graffiti, Jewish leaders have had hate-mail and ordinary people have been subjected to insults and vandalism.

But honestly, violent antisemitism (with Israel as a threadbare excuse) has been on the rise in Europe for years. And the authorities haven’t done enough about it because, it seems, they’re too afraid of the Muslims who seem to be behind these attacks and who do blow things up.

The incentive structure that this creates will likely come back to haunt them in a number of ways. But regardless, the virus of antisemitism seems to be spreading.

UPDATE: “Hey, kidnappers are people, too!”

Related item here.

THE STATE DEPARTMENT PRACTICES APPEASEMENT:

Washington on Friday condemned caricatures in European newspapers of the Prophet Mohammad, siding with Muslims who are outraged that the publications put press freedom over respect for religion.

By inserting itself into a dispute that has become a lightning rod for anti-European sentiment across the Muslim world, the United States could help its own battered image among Muslims.

“These cartoons are indeed offensive to the belief of Muslims,” State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said in answer to a question. “We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.”

“We call for tolerance and respect for all communities for their religious beliefs and practices,” he added.

Major U.S. publications have not republishing the cartoons, which include depictions of Mohammad as a terrorist. That is in contrast to European media, which responded to the criticism against the original Danish newspaper that printed the caricatures by republishing the offensive images themselves.

Perhaps this is just payback for European non-support on other topics, but I think it’s a dreadful mistake.

UPDATE: Reader John Friedman emails: “I’m sorry. Did I miss the State Dept. analysis of ‘Piss Christ?’ Perhaps you could link to it.”

I’m sorry, but the lesson here is that if you want to be listened to, you should blow things up. That’s a very bad incentive structure, but it’s the one the allegedly responsible parties have created.

Related thoughts from Sissy Willis. Meanwhile, a reader from Belgium emails:

On the “dreadful mistake bit”. Of course we Europeans (I am Belgian) have only ourselves to blame but Americans have to understand how fearful we are becoming of this violent minority in our midst. Muslims are already a majority in the lowest age groups in several large European cities. The potential for civil war is clearly there and what is even more worrysome is the dedication of most our governments to appeasement.

For the US State dept to seize this opportunity to burnish its image with the “muslim community” was only to be expected however and I am pretty sure that this is exactly the kind of noise our governments would want to hear from the US at this stage. So no harm done to us in any case. It will gain you zero goodwill from the fanatics, but it will not harm us. I do hope however that nobody at State dept really thinks that the fanatics have to be appeased and that those caricatures should not have been published. *That* would be a mistake of the first magnitude.

Bernard Vanden Bloock
Overijse
Belgium

I agree.

PIETER DORSMANN compares the controversy over the Mohammed cartoons with that over Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.”

The lesson is that if you want your religion not to be mocked, it helps to have a reputation for senseless violence. Is this the incentive structure we want?

DEAN ESMAY offers an interesting question for conservatives: If Kerry is elected, will they try to support him if he does the right thing, or will they degenerate into partisan backbiting as Democrats did after 2000 (and as Republicans did after 1992):

I don’t want to hear why you think it won’t happen. Indulge me: pretend it might. How many of you will have the patriotism to say, “I disagree with many of his policy directions, I do not think he is conducting our foreign policy in the right way, but I will do my best to get behind him and support him until elections come around next time?”

I’m genuinely curious. For that is the stance I intend to take. I will refuse to call him traitor, loser, liar, incompetent. He will be my President, my Commander In Chief, the Chief Executive of a great nation, elected by the will of a majority of the electors in these 50 great united States. So even if he does things I disagree with in conducting foreign policy, I will say, “I respectfully disagree with the President’s directions, but I will do my best to express my dissent respectfully and hope that I am mistaken and that he has made the proper decisions after all.”

That’s my pledge. How many of you will take a similar one?

Although I’m a liberal blogger, that’s certainly how I intend to act, should Kerry be elected. There’s some interesting stuff in Dean’s comments, where most people seem to take the same line. It does, however, raise the problem identified in this comment to Bigwig’s pro-Kerry post:

Aren’t you basically saying that Republicans can be counted on to support the country and the WoT if a Democrat is in office, but not vice versa? This argument lets the Democrats who would rather control the White House than have the U.S. remain safe and secure off the hook. Not a good precedent. Rather Kerry and the Democratic party should be punished for undermining Bush and creating the division in the country, not rewarded!

I’ll still take the pledge, but this is worth thinking about. That sort of incentive structure seems dangerous.