Yasser Arafat is ailing. The man’s 75, and he probably didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about proper diet and excercise in his younger days. If he dies, it will mean big, and unpredictable, changes in the middle east.

ARE EX-PATS REALLY GOING OVERWHELMINGLY FOR KERRY? You’d think so, from all the stories the media has run on the subject. But of course, when journalists look to do such stories, they’re likely to ask around among the people they know, adn the people they know are likely other liberals who have moved to Europe for cultural, rather than commercial reasons. I’ve no doubt that art students at the Sorbonne are almost all pro-Kerry, but I’m no so sure about petroleum engineers in Saudi Arabia.

WHY DON’T THEY JUST . . . Many people ask “Why can’t they just . . . ” followed by some eminently sensible solution to a common problem. The answer to most such questions is green, and folds. “Why can’t they just give us more legroom (or derriere-room) on airlines?” Because it would make each ticket much more expensive. “Why don’t they just make people cut down on the amount of energy they use?” Because Carbon = Energy = Economic activity. Why don’t companies give me the lavish customer service, stellar product performance, and elegant design I want? Generally, because I’m only willing to pay $14.95 plus tax for whatever they’re selling me. Americans pretty much shop on one thing, price, and then bitch like hell about what we get for our money.

(that said, American customer service is, in my experience, about the best in the world anyway. That competition stuff — and the danger of actually getting fired — is a wonderful motivator.)

A correspondant in the hardware industry emails to say that this is also the reason that companies don’t want to ship CDs:

First off, the profit on a printer is very slim. The printer business is razor/razor blade. All the profit is made on consumables ( paper/ink) Since the profit is slim the product marketing folks will take every measure to lower unpredicatable costs.. costs like returns and tech support.

When a product first ships it might make sense to have driver CDs to ship customers.. the CD costs about 30-50cents and then you have the cost of the mailing, and the cost of holding the CDs and the cost of handling. For example, it might cost 5 bucks or so when you consider all the factors involved in doing a CD fulfillment.

That’s why those of us in the industry like downloads… No mail room, no overstocking the wrong driver CDs etc etc. For example, if I ship 1 million printers a month how many spare CDs should I have in stock to ship to customers who call and ask for one? 5000? 10,000? and what happens to these excess CDs when the driver changes mid production? I have to grind them. Thats like shredding money. Pennies matter. Now, you may argue that pissing off customers costs too. It does. But it is not as trackable. Since most product marketing folks are judged on P&L issues any cost that is trackable needs to be controlled.

So the cost associated with shipping replacement CDs on out of warrenty products is tracked while the cost of losing customers who couldnt get a disk is not tracked.

This highlights another interesting problem for companies: how to get information. Costs can easily be tracked, in the modern world, but outside of mom-and-pop shops in small towns, customer satisfaction can’t. It’s natural to focus on what you can measure, over what you can’t, which is why I think customer service is getting worse across the technology industry: computers are a mature product that customers don’t need hand-holding to persuade them to buy, so it’s natural to shift the focus from reassuring technophobes to controlling costs.

This problem is hardly limited to corporations; think about why your politicians spend so much time passing laws, even though things basically seem to be running okay already. Politicians can’t just go back to the voters and say “We weren’t attacked by terrorists or roving wolf packs, so re-elect me”. They need the Trent Lott Memorial Hogback Research Project at the University of Mississippi to show their constituents that they’re really working for their money. Needless to say, 50 states, each of which has two senators, each trying to increase their wealth through federal largesse, is like trying to get rich by picking your own pocket. But it goes on, because we don’t measure good government; we measure results.

Incidentally, the people at HP have contacted me and been very helpful about fixing the problem. If only Chuck Schumer would get back to me so quickly about that idea I have for a solar-powered steamship to run up and down the Hudson . . .

WE MAY NOT BE MORE DIVIDED, BUT SOME OF US SURE ARE CRAZIER: A Florida Democrat apparently tried to play chicken with Katherine Harris and several campaign supporters. Unfortunately, he was the only one with a car.

HOW DIVIDED ARE WE REALLY? I’ve heard a fair amount of overblown rhetoric on this election, along the lines of “this is the most divided electorate ever! Really? Ever looked at an electoral map of 1860?

Actually, the striking thing is how settled the electorate is. The last election where one party got less than 35% of the vote was 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party split the Republicans in two. Even during Reconstruction, when the Republican Party had basically disenfranchised the Democratic states, the popular vote totals were very close. Almost never does one party get more than 60%, or less than 40% of the vote.

We’ve had elections as close as the last one before, and we’ll have it again (although not since the 1880s have two elections in a row been so closely contested.) The real issue is not that the popular vote totals are close, but that states are so closely balanced — another situation that hasn’t prevailed since the 1880s.

Why so close? Presumably it’s because people are more mobile than ever before, which breaks down the regional affiliations that hauled solid electoral vote tallies out of close elections. So while some places are more solidly partisan than ever before . . . like, ahem, the places where all the media headquarters are . . . the real trouble is that key states are becoming less divided. I assume it makes people more tolerant, having members of the other party for neighbours, but I wouldn’t know, having lived my whole life within one overwhelmingly liberal community or another.

CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME? I just talked to Hewlett Packard, the makers of my mother’s printer. My mother, who is somewhat technologically challenged, threw out the driver CD for her printer by accident, and the drivers that you download from the internet don’t work. This is apparently a known problem, at least with the Officejet 5510, or so I was told by the technician I called a few months ago to work on the problem. He promised to send a CD, but it never arrived.

When I called back today, I was told that the printer shows up in their database as out of warranty, and moreover, that even if it was in warranty, they couldn’t send me a CD unless it was within 90 days of purchase. I argued, to no avail, that they had promised me a CD when it was within the specified period. Unfortunately, they have somehow lost the record of that call. I argued, also to no avail, that the fact that I was aware of an internally known problem with their online drivers would indicate that I had, in fact, spoken to someone at HP, but got nowhere. They will not send me a CD unless I can provide them a proof of purchase, but neither my mother nor myself remembers where we bought it, and the boxes have long been thrown away. Apparently as far as the HP folks are concerned, my mother’s printer can sit lifeless on her desk until the end of time, rather than sending her a CD which costs a few cents to make and mail, and which has absolutely no economic value to people who have not already given HP several hundred dollars for a printer.

Can someone explain this policy to me? I can understand not wanting to send parts, which cost money to make and ship, but a CD? This would seem guaranteed to alienate customers, at pretty much no economic gain to the company. Is there a black market in driver CDs for the HP Officejet line of which I am unaware? I’m emailable at janegalt -at- janegalt dot net if you have any ideas.

UPDATE: A number of readers have suggested that it’s so I’ll have to buy another printer. But I find it hard to believe that this policy would encourage more people to buy from them; what benefit do they get from generating more sales from Canon?

FURTHER UPDATE: A number of readers suggest that this problem is widespread in the industry.

MY OWN THOUGHT: Like abortion and Israel, posts about tech support problems generate A LOT of email. Thanks for everyone who’s suggested web sites to try — though I suspect that they’ll have the same bad driver that doesn’t work on my Mom’s printer; the supervisor I talked to this time, while denying the problem, let it slip that the driver pack is somehow incomplete. But all suggestions are very welcome, as I can’t quite face telling my mother she’s the proud owner of a $200 paperweight.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Another reader suggests that HP released a new driver set last week that may take care of the installation problem. Why on earth didn’t the technicians at HP mention this? Heartfelt thanks, anyway; I’ll try it tonight.

ALL RIGHT, ONE MORE UPDATE: A reader emails to suggest, with some rather strenuous critcism of yours truly thrown in for good measure, that the problem may lie with their legal agreements with Microsoft, which limit what they can do with the software. This strikes me as extremely unlikely, given that they make a version available on their web site to download for free, but I suppose it’s possible.

HP RESPONDS: Someone from HP has contacted me to try to fix the problem. The power of Instapundit is truly frightening. I’ve suggested that they consider changing their policy on CD shipment, as I simply can’t imagine how the money it saves is worth the aggravation of their customers, or the salaries of the guys I kept on the phone trying to bully a CD out of them. But Lord knows, the folks at HP probably have better places to get business advice than from me.

THE GENETIC BASIS OF RACE: Are there genetic differences between the races? As you’d expect of any subgroup breeding mostly within the group, the answer is of course there is. Scientists seem to be converging on the view that there is more genetic basis than one side of the argument had hoped, although less than the other side had averred. But the really good news is that as we get better data, it won’t really matter:

“We don’t have to use race as a surrogate for the biology when we can identify the underlying biology,” said Dr. Georgia M. Dunston, founding director of the Howard genome center. “By removing the barriers implied by the racial classifications we can more effectively study population differences in disease distribution.”

In the short term, though, race may make a good proxy for analysing things like disease distribution until genomic sequencing becomes widespread, as I think it eventually will.

A CLOSER LOOK AT CULPABILITY: The New York Sun reports that the US asked the IAEA to destroy the looted explosives in 1995

Nine years ago, U.N. weapons inspectors urgently called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to demolish powerful plastic explosives in a facility that Iraq’s interim government said this month was looted due to poor security.

The chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told The New York Sun yesterday that in 1995, when he was a member of the U.N. inspections team in Iraq, he urged the United Nations’ atomic watchdog to remove tons of explosives that have since been declared missing.

Mr. Duelfer said he was rebuffed at the time by the Vienna-based agency because its officials were not convinced the presence of the HMX, RDX, and PETN explosives was directly related to Saddam Hussein’s programs to amass weapons of mass destruction.

Instead of accepting recommendations to destroy the stocks, Mr. Duelfer said, the atomic-energy agency opted to continue to monitor them.

By e-mail, Mr. Duelfer wrote the Sun, “The policy was if acquired for the WMD program and used for it, it should be subject for destruction. The HMX was just that. Nevertheless the IAEA decided to let Iraq keep the stuff, like they needed more explosives.”

UPDATE: Roger Simon has more.

COPYCAT: A number of people have emailed this New York Sun story alleging that Kerry committed plagiarism in his books. Oddly enough, I’m reading Past Perfect right now, a book about the recent plagiarism adn fraud scandals among American historians. As I read the section on Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, I thought that their plagiarism was a rather abstruse crime, the kind that gets professionals outraged but leaves laymen cold, the way journalists get about source confidentiality. I suspect they’ll feel the same way about Kerry’s crime, assuming this story pans out.

SIX OF ONE, HALF A DOZEN OF THE OTHER: Will Wilkinson points out that allowing people to vote illegally is effectively the exact same thing as suppressing legal votes:

The strange thing is that the press seems to treat illegitimate votes as a kind of noise, a kind of tolerable if unfortunate democratic static, while intimidated no-shows are a travesty against all that is holy. Yet, and this should be obvious, in terms of the aggregative democratic procedure, an unnoticed illegal vote for one guy (in a two horse race) is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT to scaring off a voter for the other guy.

If somebody’s dog manages to vote for John Kerry, then, in effect, Velma Thompson (or whomever) failed to vote for that nice man, George W. Bush, even though she tried. Whiskers cancels out Velma. Here’s another way to make the same point. Each Bush vote is paired with a Kerry vote and they’re both thrown away. The winner is the one who has votes left on the table after all the other guy’s votes have been chucked. Pairing legitimate voters with voting felons, dogs, corpses, and Frenchmen has precisely the same effect on the outcome as shooting legitimate voters before they can get in the door of the high school gym.

Republican vigilance about keeping illegal voters from voting is democratically equivalent to Democratic vigilance against Republican attempts to suppress the legal vote. Republican vigilance has the semi-intended side-effect of suppressing likely Democratic votes. And huge Democratic registration and GOTV drives have the semi-intended side-effect of canceling out a large number of Republican votes with illegal ballots. I bet I can tell from your party affiliation which you think is worse.

Need I say it? Read the whole thing.

MAYBE HILARY’S PROFICIENCY WITH CATTLE FUTURES WASN’T SO UNUSUAL: Professor Bainbridge has a nifty piece on the not very suprising fact that our Senators do amazingly well in the stock market, outperforming such investment luminaries as Peter Lynch and Warren Buffet. How do they do it? Innate brilliance or inside information? We report,you decide.

JUST HOW EXPLOSIVE ARE THEY? Much has been made of the fact, by opponents of the administration, that the missing explosives are so powerful that only a pound (or half a pound, depending on the source) was capable of taking down Pan Am Flight 103.

I’m under the impression, however, that an airplane requires very little explosive to take it down, because it’s just a thin aluminum skin covering a) a lot of very important wires and b) the open sky, so a little of it is likely to either damage the plane beyond operability, or catastrophically depressurize the plane. Can readers enlighten me?

Update Bill at INDC points to a Baltimore Sun piece which says that the missing explosives are only “slightly more powerful than TNT”. He also points out that it was neither HDX nor RDX, but the much more powerful Semtex (of which RDX is a component) that brought down Pan Am 103. The last points out that the explain did explode into multiple pieces when the bomb went off, so the explosion must have been very powerful.

Further Update Another reader writes

The bomb used in the downing of PA-103 was not very powerful, just powerful enough.

I’ve seen the wreckage of the plane as assembled at the UK’s equivalent of the NTSB. Most of that wreckage is in large pieces. What brought the plane down was that the integrity of the plane’s skin was broken. With even a square-foot’s worth of skin torn open into a 500+ mph wind stream, the plane had to come apart.

There’s a strip of aluminum skin, originating at the place where the explosion breached the hull that “unzipped” up and over the top of the plane, then down the other side, all the way to the bottom of the hull. The hole created by the explosion is no bigger than a softball. The strip of skin that “unzipped” ranges from six inches to 10 feet in width; the entire strip is over 60 feet long.

Once the integrity of the hull was breached, though, that wind simply tore the plane apart. The NTSB website also has good details on the physical aspects of the explosion.

I too read Andrew Sullivan’s entirely unsurprising endorsement of Kerry, and while he advances an argument I’m sympathetic to–that while the decision to go to Iraq was right, the administration screwed up in major ways once it got there–he also advances some of the most oft-seen, and to my mind unconvincing, reasons to trust Kerry with national security:

Does Kerry believe in this war? Skeptics say he doesn’t. They don’t believe he has understood the significance of September 11. They rightly point to the antiwar and anti-Western attitudes of some in his base–the Michael Moores and Noam Chomskys who will celebrate a Kerry victory. I understand their worries. But they should listen to what Kerry has said. The convention was a remarkable event in that it pivoted the Democratic Party toward an uncomplicated embrace of the war on terror. Kerry has said again and again that he will not hesitate to defend this country and go on the offensive against Al Qaeda. I see no reason whatsoever why he shouldn’t. What is there to gain from failure in this task? He knows that if he lets his guard down and if terrorists strike or succeed anywhere, he runs the risk of discrediting the Democrats as a party of national security for a generation. He has said quite clearly that he will not “cut and run” in Iraq. And the truth is: He cannot. There is no alternative to seeing the war through in Iraq. And Kerry’s new mandate and fresh administration will increase the options available to us for winning. He has every incentive to be tough enough but far more leeway to be flexible than the incumbent.

Besides, the Democratic Party needs to be forced to take responsibility for the security of the country that is as much theirs as anyone’s. The greatest weakness of the war effort so far has been the way it has become a partisan affair. This is the fault of both sides: the Rove-like opportunists on the right and the Moore-like haters on the left. But in wartime, a president bears the greater responsibility for keeping the country united. And this president has fundamentally failed in this respect. I want this war to be as bipartisan as the cold war, to bring both parties to the supreme task in front of us, to offer differing tactics and arguments and personnel in pursuit of the same cause. This is not, should not be, and one day cannot be, Bush’s war. And the more it is, the more America loses, and our enemies gain.

The idea that we should trust Kerry, even if we think his previous foriegn policy instincts have all been bad, because he has nothing to gain from failing to pursue Al Qaeda, makes little sense. Surely George Bush had nothing to gain from failing to suppress the insurgency in Iraq, and yet his administration still hasn’t done so. This argument seems to fall into the partisan assumption that if Kerry fails it will be out of malice. But most people who think that Kerry isn’t the right man for the job think he will fail not because he wants to, but because he’s fundamentally wrong in some way in his national security strategy.

Similarly, it doesn’t strike me as very logical to imply that Democrats have abandoned national security issues, and then suggest electing them anyway as a way to force them to “take responsibility” for national security, any more than I would employ a drug addict in a pharmacy on the theory that this would force him to “take responsibility” for enforcing our nation’s drug laws.

One may believe, as many do, that Kerry will be better on national security for other reasons. Andrew Sullivan offers several of them in his peice. But neither of these two strikes me as very compelling.

PLEASE, GOD, LET THEM BE WRONG: 6 in 10 voters think it’s unlikely we’ll have a clear winner on November 3rd. If there’s one thing I most fervently hope for this election, it’s that whoever wins, wins big. I’m not sure the country can take another four years of “He stole it!” Although I confess that I would enjoy seeing John Kerry win the electoral college while losing the popular vote, if only so that I could measure how quickly & seamlessly partisans on both sides can switch positions on the “validity” of an electoral college victory, and the moral obligation it imposes on the candidate to govern as if he were a member of the other party.

BLOOD FOR OIL: William F Buckley says it’s a fair trade

If you are willing to die in order to protect your local hospital, then you must be willing to die for oil, because without electricity, your hospital won’t take you beyond a surgeon’s scalpel, and a surgeon is helpless without illumination, which is provided (in many places) by oil.

To say that we must not fight for oil is utter cant. To fight for oil is to fight in order to maintain such sovereignty as we exercise over the natural world. Socialism plus electricity, Lenin said at the outset of the Soviet revolution, would usher in the ideal state. He was wrong about socialism but not about electricity. Electricity gives us whatever leverage we have over nature.

To flit on airily about an unwillingness to fight for oil suggests an indifference to the alleviation of poverty at the next level after bread and water. Throw in, perhaps, the wheel. That too is an indispensable scaffolding of human power over nature. But then comes all the power not generated by the muscles of human beings and beasts of burden.

Oddly, those who speak so lightly about oil are often the most reluctant to explore seriously alternatives to it. In the history of discovery, only one such has materialized, which is nuclear power. Although nuclear power proceeds inconspicuously to light most of the lamps in France and promises to do as much in China, a mix of superstition and Luddism stands in the way of developing the nuclear alternative here.

Meanwhile, we must get on with oil, and the reserves of it are diminishing, and such great storehouses of oil as exist are mostly in the Middle East. The idea that our effort in Iraq is motivated by lust for its oil fields is easily dispelled by asking who is today profiting from such oil as is being produced in Iraq? The answer is: the Iraqis. The great need now is for increased security forces deployed to protect the oil from the nihilists and from those who reduce any consideration of oil to politics. What is achieved, that any sober judgment will approve of, by the destruction of oil fields, the kind of thing that Saddam Hussein tried to do in Kuwait in 1991?

PILOT ERROR: The FAA says that the November 2001 airliner crash, which caused natural fears that it was another terrorist attack, was the result of pilot error.

Update A reader emails to say that since the story says the co-pilot did what his airline had trained him to do, it wasn’t pilot error. Let’s say that the pilot seems to have done the wrong thing, but where the culpability for his action lies is unclear.

Update IIAnother reader, a pilot, emails to say everything’s pilot error:

Nearly every thing is pilot error, at least anything the pilot could have prevented. It’s a broad category, but that’s what you get for being in charge! As my instructor told me once, if the steering doesn’t work when you take off it’s not the guy who switched cable’s fault, it’s the pilots for not making sure the ailerons moved in the right direction before he started going fast.

STICKER SHOCK The article I linked below contains some cost comparisons:

Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus estimated that in inflation-adjusted terms, World War I cost just under $200 billion for the United States. The Vietnam War cost about $500 billion from 1964 to 1972, Nordhaus said. The cost of the Iraq war could reach nearly half that number by next fall, 2 1/2 years after it began.

How could that be? World War I and Vietnam were both much, much larger efforts than the current conflict, so how come this one costs so much? The answer is that we’re substituting capital for labor: we use a lot more equipment, and a lot fewer men. Since destroyed equipment is a lot easier to replace than destroyed people, it’s a price I’m very glad to pay.

Update A reader emails the following:

Sorry, but your theory isn’t the answer. It’s much simpler: Nordhaus isn’t being straight with the American people. The missing element is that the American economy is much larger today than it was in 1918. Inflation doesn’t account for real economic growth. That’s why it’s real economic growth. Working backwards, $200 billion in 2003 dollars is $20.4 billion in 1918 dollars. But the GDP in 1918 in 1918 dollars was $69.35 billion. That means the cost of WWI was over 29% of GDP at the time, spread out over only about 18 months. By comparison, the cost of the Iraq war will be less than 3% of GDP. We budget about 3.5% a year on defense. The cost of the Iraq war, then, spread out over three years, represents about a 30% excess per year over peacetime spending. That seems trifling in comparion, doesn’t it?

I agree that in GDP terms, the cost of the current war looks trivial compared to earlier wars. But absolute figures matter too, and it’s striking that our ancestors managed to fight much larger conflicts–there were over 2 million men in the American Expeditionary Force that was sent to fight World War I–with so little money.

The reason they could is that back then, life was cheaper, so they used more of it, and less of everything else. The typical soldier’s kit of World War I would hardly do the modern military man for an overnight camping trip with his buddies.

A HEARTENING SIGN FOR HAWKS The administration is apparently planning to ask for $70 billion more for the war in Iraq, which will bring the total price tag to about $225 billion. Yes, that’s a lot of money, but on the other hand, remember when folks like Eric Alterman were telling us it was going to cost trillions?

The war has cost more than I think I thought it would (I don’t remember ever assigning it an exact price tag), but if it succeeds in building a democracy in the middle east, it will be well worth the cost. And the administration’s willingness to throw around a big figure like this the week before the election shows me that they’re taking it seriously–and compares very favourably to John Kerry’s political opportunism on the issue.

THEY WON’T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER! The Democratic get-out-the-vote effort seems to have kicked it up a notch: when I walked out of the house this morning, I saw the neighborhood festooned with signs reading “Vote or Die!” This on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is so reliably Democratic that the Republicans often don’t bother to run candidates for local elections. It makes me wonder what they’re up to in the swing states–“Vote or we’ll not only kill you, we’ll torture your family!”

BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? If you’re a born-and-bred political junkie like me (my father’s the head of a trade association), you’re checking the polls with a frequency to shame those lab rats they train to push levers so they can dose themselves up with crack. Polling Report, <a href=”http://www.electoral-vote.comthe electoral vote map, Real Clear Politics, Slate’s Election Scorecard . . . it’s a wonder I get any sleep at all.

But what does it mean for the election when Hawaii suddenly, and astonishingly, trends Bush? How come none of the polls agree? And why can’t they invent a really good fat free ice cream so I won’t gain thirty pounds waiting for the results to come in? A good place to start is this handy list of electoral votes from the Federal Elections Commission. And Mystery Pollster has lengthy explanations of all the Big Questions in polling, like “Aren’t there, maybe, please God, a lot of extra Democratic voters the polls are missing because they only have cell phones?” (Answer: Probably not.)

If you’re a Republican and want to tweak your Democratic friends, send them the FEC list and point out that, contrary to the arguments of Ruy Teixera and John Judis in The Emerging Democratic Majority, states that went for Bush in 2000 had a net gain of electoral votes (and thus population) after the last census, while states that went for Gore lost population and seats in the electoral college.

Update Doctor Weevil has more on political vices:

All in all, I feel a bit like the friend of a friend, who tried to cure his alcholism by taking up cocaine. He thought he could use the drug to wean him from liquor and then quit it, too, but ended up as a cocaine-addicted alcoholic. (I wrote a bit more about him here.) I want my blogs and my polls! Now! Please? A drink would be nice, too, but not for a few hours.

HE WAS FOR IT BEFORE HE WAS AGAINST IT Mickey Kaus points out that a McLaughlin group transcript from October of ’01 shows Kerry saying:

I have no doubt, I’ve never had any doubt — and I’ve said this publicly — about our ability to be successful in Afghanistan. We are and we will be. The larger issue, John, is what happens afterwards. How do we now turn attention ultimately to Saddam Hussein? How do we deal with the larger Muslim world? What is our foreign policy going to be to drain the swamp of terrorism on a global basis?

But wait, there’s more! This transcript is actually being pushed by the Kerry campaign, as proof that he called for more troops in Afghanistan. But if you look at the section where he’s supposedly calling for more troops, you’ll find that it’s been rather creatively trimmed by the Kerry team. The good senator was actually referring to his past calls for more “boots on the ground”, but reported himself satisfied with troop levels by the time of the interview, on October 16th, 2001.

Don’t Kerry’s people know about the internet yet?

A tidbit for bloggers out there: if you’ve ever had the experience of being “instapundited”, you’ll know that your traffic (and your bandwith bills!) go through the roof whenever Glenn links to you. I’ve just had the odd experience of instapunditing myself in my first post here, which feels a little like one of those pictures you see of someone with mirrors both in front and behind them, looking into an infinitely receding series of their face and back . . .

IS GRIDLOCK THE ANSWER TO REDUCING DOMESTIC SPENDING? There are a fairish number of people who are steeling themselves to vote for Kerry in the hope that gridlock will hold down government spending. I’ve investigated this myself, as I mulled my vote, and found that, just as conservatives have been claiming, the spending slowdown of the Clinton years seems to have been less a product of gridlock (or Clinton’s much-overhyped committment to deficit reduction) than of Newt Gingrich and the post-Cold-war peace dividend. After the Republicans got their hats handed to them in the ’98 midterms, everyone seems to have decided that the secret to popularity was to spend! spend! spend! — by Clinton’s last budget, domestic discretionary spending (which, other than defense spending, is the only thing the president or the congress has much control over year to year) was growing at 5% per-annum. So I was very sceptical that a Kerry presidency would mean, as some of my friends and correspondants have tried to convince me, a return to fiscal rectitude.

Now The Economist confirms my worries, with an elegantly written article on what we can really expect from gridlock.

This seems, at first glance, like a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea: let people have charge cards on which to borrow against their 401(k) savings. Indeed, after we heard about it on television yesterday afternoon, my ultra-libertarian boyfriend was hopping up and down shouting “there ought to be a law!”

But the article tells me that some very smart, very famous economists, such as the late Franco Modigliani, and the very current Larry Summers, are in favour of it, arguing that allowing people to borrow against their savings will increase their willingness to save in the first place. My instincts cry out against it–I know too many people who are charging their way towards bankruptcy, despite having already tapped their home equity to pay down credit card debt once or twice–but Modigliani and Summers are a lot smarter than I am, and half of the study of economics is learning that your instincts aren’t a very reliable guide to what makes people better off.

Anyone who spends any amount of time listening to arguments about political economy will end up getting an earful about the efficient markets hypothesis (briefly, the theory that market prices reflect all available information).

This is not a popular theory with many segments of the commentariat, mostly those who are unhappy with the value the markets have assigned to something–such as their labour. Thus one is always seeing stories about the death of efficient markets; such reports, like those of the death of Mark Twain, are generally greatly exaggerated.

After Vernon Smith and Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for behavioural economics (briefly, the study of ways in which market actors, a.k.a people, behave irrationally), it became the Great White Hope for finally toppling the hated edifice. There are two problems with this. The first is that even though people can be observed behaving irrationally, EMH still has pretty good predictive value. The second is nicely explained by Zimran Ahmed who, like me, is an alumnus of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, the quasi-official Home of the Efficient Markets Theory.

It is true that behaviorists’ ideas have become mainstream (at least at Chicago), but this does not mean what people think it means.

Firstly, the truth is that the Chicago School of Economics was always aware of and looking for explanations for market bubbles — and obvious (in hindsight) demonstration of market irrationality. More obscure phenomena, such as a “equity risk premium” similarly eluded free market explanations. Behavioral experiments shed light on these and so provide answers to key, outstanding economic questions.

Secondly, the truth is that the cognitive biases identified by Thaler et al do not vanish once the decision moves from the market to the committee. Left-wing folks have gravitated towards behavioral economics because they see it as a way to escape the defeatest free-market prescriptions of classical economics. Unfortunately, behavioral economics says that market participants can be irrational because they are human, which is easily extended into committee members can be irrational because they are human. Behavioral economics does not allow for the benevolent central planning that seems to attractive to many.

So what is it good for? According to Thaler and U Chicago law professor, the provocatively titled Libertarian Paternalism.

What a great title.

Libertarian paternalism takes behavioral insights — such as default choices matter — and marries that with the fierce individualism at the heart of libertarianism. So, you let people do what they want, but you work hard to make sure that the defaults are right. This has the benefit of making the default choice (and there must always be a default choice) considered instead of random, but you mitigate the danger of the committee getting it wrong by letting people change the choice if they want.