LULA OVER HUGO? Let’s not get too optimistic just yet, but here is some evidence that Raul Castro might lean more toward Brazil’s Lula da Silva than Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. According to one report, he asked the Brazilian president to help with a political and economic transformation process in Cuba. We’ll see.

NEW YORK CITY, right now, from my perch in Brooklyn Heights:

IN THE MAIL: The Mormon Way of Doing Business: How Eight Western Boys Reached the Top of Corporate America. From the mailer, an appealing tidbit: “They rarely work Sundays, they come home for dinner, and they do chores around the house. Yet they compete very successfully against workaholics who routinely put in seventy to eighty-hour weeks.” It can be done!

“INDOCTRINATE U” is now available to buy and download on line here. The film — which I watched the other day — uses that “Roger and Me” approach where the filmmaker confronts people who have not agreed to an interview, and you probably already know whether you love to laugh at people who are trapped into defending the bureaucracy they work for. I think the conflict between free speech on campus and dealing with racial and sexual harassment is quite a bit more subtle than Evan Coyne Maloney makes it out to be, but it’s an amusing presentation of his point of view.

AND: If you want to argue with me about this, go here.

CAN WE JUDGE THE CANDIDATES by the way they woo Bill Richardson?

‘IT OFTEN SEEMS AS IF, TO THEM, I WILL ALWAYS BE BLACK FIRST and a student second.” So reads Michelle Obama’s senior thesis, written when she was a student at Princeton. You can read the whole thing, which I’m not going to do, but I did read the first few pages, and nothing I read troubles me. I should add that I attended her speech at Madison — the one where she said “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change” — and that line didn’t jump out at me. But she’s the wife of a presidential candidate, so her words will necessarily be raw material for attacks, especially what she’s saying now. But what she wrote as a college student in 1985? She had much more reason to feel alienated than the average college student — and anyway, feeling alienated is a classic part of the young American experience. Amba has read much more of the thesis than I have, and she has some excellent observations:

What was being weighed here… was whether it was better to participate in the common life or to build up a separate community with its own resources and institutions, as “a necessary stage for the development of the Black community before this group integrates into the ‘open society’.” Before, not instead of. Ideas are always psychobiography, and you may feel here the young Michelle’s sense that she needed to gain confidence in a context of people who were familiar and supportive before venturing forth into a more ambiguous, less embracing world that was harder to read and harder to trust.

ADDED: If you want to argue with me, come over here and you can.

AND: Captain Ed has read the whole thesis:

It found — surprise! — that black students who socialized more with whites before and during Princeton were more comfortable with whites later, and those who didn’t, weren’t. Interestingly, they all more closely identified with the black community during the Princeton years, and that mostly declined when they went out into the world afterwards. There were more subtle variations on ideological trends, and attempts to drill down into “literateness” and other subjective analyses, which made the project rather ambitious if not completely convincing. At the conclusion, she acknowledges that her more hard-line attitudes and assumptions about blacks who did not meet her definition of “identification” were incorrect and naive.

THERE IS A GOD Today’s Chris Muir cartoon is a must-read.

CONFESSIONS of a Language Addict: “I don’t know whether Breton will hang on, though I’m not overly optimistic. And if it doesn’t, I’m certainly not prepared to shrug my shoulders and mouth platitudes about the progress of civilization and how it’s all for the best. On the other hand, it’s not all for the worst. Truth be told, without the nationalization and globalization that threaten Breton culture and even make people uneasy about the status of French culture, a kid from rural Michigan would never have seen the Breton culture to mourn its passing – or gone to Brittany to study French!”

SWINGING FROM THEIR OWN PETARD

As longtime readers of the blog know, I’m related to the Swing Voter, aka my mother. Her vote is an infallible indicator of who will win the general election. We had dinner last night, and somewhat to my surprise, The Swing Voter is completely outraged by the New York Times story–she vows to no longer take the Times, nay, not even for the Sunday crossword. She is also now thinking seriously about voting for McCain just to spite the New York Times.

I found myself offering a tepid defense of what really is a pretty indefensible story: to wit, that reporters in cases like this usually know more they can tell, because so many sources refuse to go on the record. The Swing Voter was unmoved. She feels like the Times, and the sort of people who staff the Times, feel that they are entitled to manipulate the election in order to get teh “right” results–that such a story would never have run about a Democrat. No doubt the folks at the Times would strenuously disagree–but it matters that people feel that way. I seriously doubt my mother is the only one.

OLD HABITS DIE HARD: Russia threatens Kosovo with military force.

IT’S A START: Golf courses will return to Cuba now that Fidel Castro is out of the way. Castro rid the island of golf courses after he lost a round to Che Guevara. (Yes, really.)

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: The New York Times says John McCain received a major boost in fundraising and support thanks to another New York Times article about his alleged affair with a lobbyist.

BUSTED: Congressman Rick Renzi (R-Arizona) is indicted for extortion, money laundering, wire fraud, and insurance fraud.

TURKISH GROUND TROOPS enter Iraqi Kurdistan.

ACE fact-checks Barack Obama.

CALLIMACHUS: Your Media At Work, Part 262.

AT THE “VISIBILITY RALLY” OUTSIDE OF THE CLINTON-OBAMA DEBATE last night in Austin, Texas. Here’s a nice set of pictures taken by my son Christopher Althouse Cohen (who’s for Hillary). My favorite:

ADDED: Then there’s this dog…

… and my other son says we should name him “Bark Obama.”

A CLARIFICATION The debate over whether people want higher taxes on themselves is, I think, slipping back and forth between two debates: a normative and a positive one. I started out with a positive claim:

What most of us are really in favor of is higher taxes on other people. If we wanted higher taxes on ourselves, we’d give the money to charity.

This is simply observationally true. People do not voluntarily give money to the government; polls show that most people support raising taxes on only a small fraction of the electorate. (Yes, yes, they’re rich. Okay, and? The observation still holds: most people want other peoples’ taxes raised, not their own. Whether this desire is justified is irrelevant.)

Henry Farrell, and others, stepped in to complain that I, like, totally didn’t understand that people behave different collectively than individually. This does not, in fact, negate my point; it supports it. Most people are not concerned with remedying the injustice of their own high income; they want large public goods that can only be secured by taking a lot of money from other people. They are willing to kick in their own money if they have to in order to secure the coalition, or because they think this is fair. But they are primarily concerned not with their own contribution, but with that of others. This will not be a surprising observation for anyone who has ever lived in a group house.

This does, however, raise an interesting normative point, into which I have now been sidetracked without quite noticing: should you, if you think that your taxes are too low, voluntarily give that money to the government? The answer, I think, is yes, for reasons that I’ve laid out in previous posts. But that is separate from the positive observation I stand by: people are more interested in levying taxes on others than they are in paying taxes themselves.

MORE ON VOLUNTARY TAXATION

Henry Farrell fires back with the delightfully titled McMuddled:

Umm, no. I sent her Tom Slee’s book, which uses the analogy of shopping at Walmart to demonstrate that vulgar revealed preference arguments do a very bad job of capturing situations of interdependent choice. This is something that is quite clearly laid out in the extended Alex Tabarrok description of Slee’s argument which I quoted in my original post. What’s at stake here isn’t shopping; it’s interdependence. When choices are genuinely interdependent, behaviour doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about the ‘true’ preferences of the actors in question. What it does tell us about, (if we think that actors are behaving rationally) is what actors think the best reply to other actors’ strategies is in a given strategic situation. I’d like it very much if Megan – and others who use similarly poorly-thought-through arguments – would read about and absorb this basic lesson of game theory. It complicates the analysis of social situations in some very useful and fruitful ways.

We seem to be talking at cross purposes. Henry seems to be treating tax revenue, rather than the things it purchases, as the collective action problem.

I concede that there is a collective action problem in providing actual public goods, like the military and statues of politicians on horseback; that is why I am not an anarchist, or even a minarchist. There is also a collective action problem in setting up a tax system in the first place; people will not participate if they think other people are not participating. This is one of the many problems with the budget of Eastern Europe.

But if you think that you have more money than is fair–money that the government should, by rights, be using for some more noble purpose–then there is no collective action problem. You can send the money to the government. They will spend that money on either actual public goods, or things that you think should be paid for out of the common weal. (Or at least, they will do this to exactly the extent that they would if you plus 20 million of your fellow citizens were forced to send them money via a new tax bill.) There is no strategic value to withholding the money from the government; your fellow citizens are not going to say to themselves, “Oh, Henry’s paying extra, so I guess it’s okay if I vote for McCain.” There is no interactivity here. You, alone, can secure more public goods by putting your extra dollars in the treasury–exactly as many public goods as your dollars will secure if you vote for a politician who extracts that tax money, plus the same amount from other similarly affluent people, via the tax code.

I suspect that Henry is trying to get, not at an actual collective action problem, because there isn’t one, but the moral intuition that we appear to have evolved in order to resolve these collective action problems at the small group level. We refuse to contribute unless everyone else does out of the sense that it’s unfair for us to do it alone. But it seems to me that if you believe that there are serious distributional injustices in our society that your extra tax dollars ought to be out there resolving, then those distributional concerns should override your resentment at those you feel are shirking their duty. There is simply no strategic benefit to withholding your extra taxes when the tax base numbers in the millions. Essentially, if you think your taxes should be higher, but won’t contribute unless everyone else also does, then you are saying you are willing to punish the neediest members of society for the sins of its more affluent members.

Which just takes us back to where I was before: people aren’t interested in increasing their own taxes; they’re willing to pay to increase other peoples’ taxes. These are not the same thing.

YUGOSLAVIA IS FINALLY DEAD: Christopher Hitchens.

A NEW Honda hybrid. Cool.

REGRETS, I HAVE A FEW . . . BUT THEN AGAIN . . . TOO FEW TO MENTION A reader sends along a link to this article from Cato’s Michael Tanner on Obama, saying “As a fellow ‘libertarian tepidly for Obama’, I ask myself more and more if it’s a sound position. This latest Cato makes me cringe a little more . . . ”

Obama’s rhetoric about trade, and his insanely bad economic “patriot act” have certainly given me pause. But do I have buyer’s remorse? No. For starters, I clearly prefer Obama to Hillary as president; on the assumption that there’s a very good chance that Generic Democrat will win the election, the primary outcome suits me.

In the general? I might not vote for Obama; I will not vote for McCain. There are some things more important than the economy, and free speech is among them. Yes, I don’t like Obama’s stance on the Second Amendment, but the difference is, the president has little wiggle room right now on the second, while McCain might do serious further damage to the first, or the fourth. I dislike the steps Obama is willing to take in order to achieve his goals of economic equality. But these are as nothing to the notion that citizens have to be protected from information because Big Daddy John thinks we’ll get bad ideas in our heads.

Moreover, Obama is running left right now to try to win the nomination. I expect he will tack right in the primaries . . . and he will probably have to govern as the fellow in the general election, because that will be his actual mandate.

WAITER SAVES WOMAN from the worst blind date ever:

Colt Haugen, a 22-year-old student at the University of Colorado and waiter at Ruby Tuesday, was working at the restaurant last month when he saw a man pull a pill from his pocket and put it in his date’s glass when the woman got up from the table. “I almost dropped the food I was holding. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Haugen says. “I talked with the manager. I told her, I said, ‘I saw this plain as day. And if we don’t do something about this, something’s going to happen to this woman.'” The police were called and when the drink was tested, it was found to contain Valium. Nancy McGrath, the woman at the table, was on a blind date and considers Haughen to be an “angel.” “He saved my life,” she says.

A few months ago, I got an attack of vertigo in a bar, so bad that I couldn’t walk. (It happens every few months) As I staggered out of the bar, having to stop and put my head between my legs every few steps in order to overcome the waves of nausea, I dimly realized that the friends I was with (both male), were informing everyone in the bar that I had vertigo. When I stopped being so sick, some hours later, I started being embarassed; I must, I thought, have looked like I was vilely, humiliatingly drunk. Was it very embarassing, I asked one friend.

“It wasn’t because you looked drunk,” he said; “You looked like the roofies had kicked in too soon.”

Thank god for interested bystanders.

BEIRUT VETERAN Lee Smith writes a guest article for my Web site about the Arab world’s views of Barack Obama.

LIKE MOST IRISH-AMERICANS, I have a sort of vague sentimental notion that the conversion of Ireland to an English-speaking nation is a linguistic and cultural tragedy. Like most Irish-Americans, I also would not want to actually live in a non-English-speaking nation. What I really want is to have learned Irish from my Grandmother, and be able to impress friends by ordering drinks in my ancestral tongue while on holiday. This is the sort of thing that makes my Irish friends complain–justly–that Irish-Americans would really like to see the whole country preserved as a sort of Colonial Williamsburg with shamrocks and twee wool caps.

This is not just a question for the Irish. Language Log is meditating on how we should feel more generally about linguistic loss:

Serious questions about the benefits (and perhaps the losses) of having an assortment of distinct native languages within one national society should be addressed through research that objectively determines and assesses the effects, not through emotional appeals to imagined cultural riches not vouched for by the language users themselves, or self-serving demands that aboriginal tongues be kept alive (by poor people) for (comparatively wealthy) linguists to study.

Something like half the world’s languages are supposed to go extinct in the next century. I find it hard to believe that the bad outweighs the good here–it is a good thing that more of the world’s people will be able to communicate with each other. Still, with each language that dies, something goes out of the world that can never be rekindled.