Boundless Rationality

The End

2007-12-21T20:51:00.000-08:00

To all,
As of the start of second semester, I will no longer be speaker of the Whig Party (I've been elected President of the Senate). With that, I must relinquish control of the Whig Party Blog to my successor, Zayn Siddique (who I'm sure will do an excellent job). It has been an honor to write for you. Best, DER

Looking Good

2007-10-24T19:14:00.000-07:00

sexytime and voter preferences

First off, I must apologize for the long delay that has accidentally crept up on me; although I’ve been very busy, I recognize that this is no excuse for my ridiculously low post count. That said, tonight I want to talk about physical appearance. Being good looking is a tremendous advantage; those described by their peers as handsome or pretty have been shown to receive huge boosts in everything from lifetime earnings (10-15% higher) to mate selection (this one seems obvious) to general lifetime wellbeing. More disturbingly, parents have been known to display a bias in favor of their better-looking offspring. Indeed, the instinct to give the comely the benefit of the doubt is a deeply engrained one; in his book Blink author Malcolm Gladwell suggests that there are powerful evolutionary reasons for this bias, such as the fact that being symmetrical improves ones reproductive chances or that good looks are generally correlated with good health, which suggests that if one must prioritize scare resources among a group it should go to the healthy (and thus the handsome).

Within the context of democratic politics, the handsomeness heuristic has had a tremendous impact. Although the correlation between handsomeness and electoral success is not entirely linear (one can be “too hot” to be taken seriously), those who look senatorial or congressional tend to win at a significantly higher rate than less attractive opponents. Indeed, in tests where control groups were given only sound free video clips of two candidates in a race they were able to pick the winner the majority of the time on looks alone. To see a recent example of this, one need look no further than the fact that nearly every serious piece on Mitt Romney sees fit to mention his looks as a key reason for his competitiveness in the race (usually mentioned just after his gigantic sack o’ cash). Furthermore, it seems likely that the impact of appearance will only increase as time goes on; with the introduction of new forms of media like youtube and new higher resolution television standards it seems likely that the impact of looks on political discourse will only continue to increase.

i'd tap that...

Up to this point, it seems as though I have made a wonderful argument against democracy. After all, if those in a democracy will vote based off irrational heuristics such as this, what chance is there that we will ever get a government that will function effectively? Of course, there are motives that could be taken to mitigate this bias; for example, if campaign financing was limited then perhaps the role of attractiveness would decrease as more voters decided based on policy and fewer looked to physical stature.

But that said, I believe that although the tendency to choose the more handsome candidate may seem ridiculous, it may have its own sort of logic. When one elects a politician they elect them not to serve in a vacuum but rather to interact with others. For congressmen, this means one must be persuasive among 434 other individuals who are as greedy and self-centered as oneself. Ditto senators. Because of this, if good-looking people really are viewed as more trustworthy, competent, or friendly, then even if the bias has no merit, it may make sense to act on it because others will likely share this bias. Put another way, if everyone thinks your dashing congressman is a swell guy, then it gives him much more leeway to advance your interests. Politicians deal with human beings, not computers, and bearing this in mind it may actually make sense on a limited scale to trade intellect for looks in selecting a candidate. Obviously, as is true with any tradeoff, one can take this too far (senator Rhianna, anyone?). That said, the very fact that a rational, intelligent person may recognize the good in picking a handsome representative suggests this bias may not be as inane as it seems.

And on the presidential level, the benefits of attractiveness are particularly salient. Tucker Carlson once described the president as America’s “orator in chief”, a description that I believe has tremendous merit. Despite the powers of office the president’s role is a relatively limited one, since he must contend with an active legislature and a gigantic bureaucracy. As such, the freedom a given president has to radically redefine America is fairly limited (though one can make a good argument that the Bush administration has changed things far more than most). Yet if the president’s power of policy is normally somewhat constrained, his influence over the public discourse is fantastically powerful. When one elects a president they elect a man who will be in their living rooms for the next four years, someone who will constantly be seen as a symbol of the United States and its government to the people of the world. In many important ways, the president is thus the nation’s most important actor; he is chosen to play a specific role and present a very specific image. Put another way, from the perspective of the average American the president’s primary role is to “be presidential”, to embody what they think a president ought to be. Indeed, if one thinks back to American presidents who are hailed as great, one finds that very often their policy successes pale in comparison to their ability to instill confidence and hope and to “be presidential’ in times of national crises. Because of this, if looking the part allows one to better fill this vital function then it is fair to say that looks are a relevant criteria in choosing a commander in chief.

Of course, there is a philosophical problem with this; isn’t it unfair to judge people on their looks? Isn’t it wrong to blame people for what they can’t control? Perhaps so. Yet as philosophers such as Peter Singer have pointed out, many other ranking mechanisms that seem more, well, fair, such as intelligence or personality trait, are randomly and arbitrarily assigned at birth in the same way that looks are. To give these other heuristics more moral consideration than looks would be a fallacy, since we didn’t choose those either. Naturally, one could argue that personality can be affected or altered by hard work, but so, too, can looks. Candidates can (and have) gone to significant lengths to improve their appearance, just as less affable politicians have worked hard at developing a new, friendly persona (think Eliot Spitzer). Naturally, this may not seem promising to someone so ugly that nothing can be done to improve them, but if said person had intelligence at the same level no one would think twice about precluding him from the political arena.

At this point, I feel that I must take a step back and consider the ramifications of treating looks as valid to leadership and political success. This is a heretical proposition, one that contradicts two decades of politically correct education and PBS Kids morality. But if one believes that this position cannot possibly form the basis of an effective society or culture, she would be well advised to look to the Greeks and Romans. In the Western tradition the importance of looks was on a par with that of other attributes like skill, dexterity, or intelligence, and maybe, just maybe, with good reason. If nothing else, by giving physical appearance a publicly acknowledged value in discourse these cultures avoided the hypocrisy that comes with announcing to the world that looks are irrelevant while choosing business leaders, politicians, and lovers on the basis of how they look.

ancient greeks, here depicted chasing young boys

Finally, I would like to close with a bundle of disclaimers. So, in no particular order:
1. Moral worth or value should NEVER be assigned based on looks (or intelligence, or any other attribute we cannot control)
2. Handsome people are NOT necessarily good politicians
3. Ugly people can be great politicians (see James Carville)
But in writing this post, my intent is not to describe how humans ought to be but rather how they are, and once one acknowledges that our governments must operate in a web of human interactions, the rationality of making looks a priority rapidly becomes apparent. Stay classy, DER

* Disclaimer: Author is an INCREDIBLY shallow person, and will go to enormous lengths to justify this attitude as acceptable. To date, he has proven fairly convincing.

Voting Away the Planet

2007-09-19T20:08:00.000-07:00

can democracy save the environment?

Tonight I would like to write about climate change and democracy. This will not be an optimistic post. Stripped to its bare minimum, democracy is a decision making apparatus. Although democratic government has come to be associated with other important ideas (such as the protection of liberty and the value and dignity due every citizen), at its core it’s a way for people to make choices. The general theory behind democratic politics is that the aggregate self-interests of the polity will combine to make better decisions than any sort of central planner or dictator. Historically, this has been a fairly effective system. It is said that democracies almost never go to war with others (though democratizing countries are often belligerent) and that they rarely have famines. Because of this, at first it seems as though if any system can deal with the difficulties of climate change, it would be liberal democracy.

But although democracy is generally a fairly effective mechanism for making decisions, there are a few types of decisions that it cannot handle well. First off, most people are pretty bad at internalizing costs that occur far into the future and so bias present concerns against later ones. Indeed, one of the reasons why we consider the state justified in paternalistic regulation of some vices is that it is assumed people can’t calculate harms that are far removed from present reality. Second, people aren’t generally great in making intuitive calculations with very large numbers or risks that are catastrophically large. When people ride without seatbelts its usually not because they expect they will die but rather because they are irrationally sure that they will not. Finally, people are far more likely to be drawn to tangible, tactile issues over vague, theoretical concerns. Known as the availability heuristic, this cognitive bias suggests that the more easily a real, vivid example can be brought to mind the more probable a situation is.

Of course, each of these biases is grounded in human evolution. Ultra-long term planning skills are not particularly useful to apes roaming the forest, while prioritizing some distant future over present concerns would likely end in starvation. The availability heuristic is no disadvantage in a world where the greatest dangers (predators, steep falls) were easily imaginable and could be taken from experience. Likewise the calculation of very large numbers would never be necessary on the savannah, and so would not prove genetically useful.

But although this trio of heuristics may have perfectly logical roots, it means that many of the complexities of the modern world elude the gut reaction of our primate brains. Take, for instance, global climate change. Today few in the scientific community doubt that human activity is increasing the planet’s temperature, and that if left unchecked this change could have disastrous consequences worldwide. Unfortunately, because global climate change deals with a risk far in the future, because it involves tremendous numbers and most of all because it will be fairly intangible to the average voter until far too late, democracies have yet to embrace the sort of changes needed. Of course, some argue that this paradigm is shifting fast, with more and more people saying that global warming concerns them. And indeed, a 2006 poll showed that 49 percent of people called global warming very or extremely important to them personally, with an additional 10 percent claiming it was somewhat important. On face, this looks like a fantastic development that proves that democracies can, in fact, address the problem. After all, 59 is greater than 50, and any coalition greater than 50 gets to make the rules. But the problem with this sort of survey is it doesn’t force people to choose. Since there is effectively no cost to saying that one finds a given topic “important”, it is likely that many will do so. Yet when voters go to the ballot box and face actual choices between addressing the nebulous, distant, and transnational threat of global warming or the daily, tangible realities of roads, hospitals, and schools, they will almost invariably opt for the latter. Indeed, this lack of political will holds not merely in the United States, but also in the so-called “green” nations of Europe, almost of all which are on pace to exceed their Kyoto quotas.

evolution is working against us

More importantly, though, even if everyone followed Kyoto to the letter, the impact would almost immediately be washed away by the exponential economic growth of the developing world. In a timely column on climate change and global growth in today’s New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman described two cities which he has visited this week, Doha, Qatar and Dalian, China. What unites these two metropolises is that in the past decade they have seemed to spring up almost overnight. Friedman observes

In Doha, since I was last there, a skyline that looks like a mini-Manhattan has sprouted from the desert. Whatever construction cranes are not in China must be in Doha today. This once sleepy harbor now has a profile of skyscrapers, thanks to a huge injection of oil and gas revenues. Dalian, with six million people, already had a mini-Manhattan when I was last here. It seems to have grown two more since — including a gleaming new convention complex built on a man-made peninsula.

But this sort of growth has a dark side to it; namely the fact that as living standards soar worldwide in the age of globalization emission rates are keeping pace. And so because:
a. There are so many people in the developing world
b. Everyone wants to live like an American

The result is that even if rich liberal democracies DO get it together in some slight way, it won’t be enough. Or to quote Friedman’s dark conclusion:

Hey, I’m really glad you switched to long-lasting compact fluorescent light bulbs in your house. But the growth in Doha and Dalian ate all your energy savings for breakfast. I’m glad you bought a hybrid car. But Doha and Dalian devoured that before noon. I am glad that the U.S. Congress is debating whether to bring U.S. auto mileage requirements up to European levels by 2020. Doha and Dalian will have those gains for lunch — maybe just the first course. I’m glad that solar and wind power are “soaring” toward 2 percent of U.S. energy generation, but Doha and Dalian will devour all those gains for dinner. I am thrilled that you are now doing the “20 green things” suggested by your favorite American magazine. Doha and Dalian will snack on them all, like popcorn before bedtime.

so says friedman

Against this backdrop, quibbles about Kyoto seem positively picayune. A sea change is needed, and for the reasons delineated above a sea change will never happen.

But although democracies all suffer from the sorts of crippling biases described and thus seem unlikely to voluntarily make the sort of drastic changes that may be needed, undemocratic organizations and groups have shown a tenacious willingness to adapt. Though it is counterintuitive, big business in the US is actually turning around fairly quickly with regard to climate change. Because a corporation’s leaders are largely trained precisely to avoid the sorts of fallacies that mislead voters and to think in the long term, and because they don’t have to balance nearly as many interests as the modern nation state, they have also been ahead of governments in many key ways. (For an interesting example of this, look no further than everyone’s favorite empire-corporation, Wal-mart ). Realizing that carbon emissions are a serious problem, many far-sighted CEOs are already drafting strategies and preparing detailed plans to operate in a post-carbon economy. Although obviously not all companies are on board, the corporate sector nonetheless furnishes examples of how fast a large organization can adapt to new ecological norms when it takes the long view and reads the writing on the wall.

But on a government scale, it may be possible that the only political mechanism that could possibly prevent ecological collapse is not a democratic one. For this, one may look to China. Let me begin by saying that China’s environment, as it stands today, is a disastrous mess. In my two months in Beijing I rarely saw blue sky, and when I did it was because of government cloud seeding helicopters that had artificially altered the weather. Yet because China is ruled by a small cadre of politicians who are nothing if not long term thinkers, the environment has become a major priority. Furthermore, if global warming or other ecological disasters require radical societal change, China has the institutional tools (and lack of democratic checks) to make it happen. Factory pollutes too much? Shut it down without compensation. All buildings need super-low emissions? No pesky workers rights lobby. People can’t internalize the long term, intangible risks of global warming? No biggie; they can’t vote.

Which brings us to today’s conclusion. It is essential that we in liberal democracies strive to think in the long term, strive to combat global warming and other such policy challenges aggressively and above all else seek to make good choices. Because if democracy doesn’t give us the right political answers to questions that will define our future as a species, a system we like far less just might.

Reset?

2007-09-16T15:41:00.000-07:00

master chief during happier times

With the imminent release of Halo 3, I thought that I’d focus today’s post on videogames and military policy. During my Halo glory days I read quite a few gaming magazines, and even then I noticed that each and every one was chock full of military recruitment advertising. On the whole, this seems quite logical. Teenage males, who comprise the core demographic of the videogaming world, are also the primary target of military recruiters. Additionally, by presenting themselves in the context of the videogame world, such ads create a sort of implicit syllogism; namely 1) videogames are fun 2) the army is like a videogame 3) joining the army would be fun. Playing off of the success of such ads, in 2002 US military created a videogame of its own, America’s Army. Praised for its authenticity and generally thought to be, well, fun, the game has been downloaded upwards of 5 million times and has recently been followed up by a sequel. Which isn’t to say that America’s Army has been entirely without controversy.

One line of attack is that the multimillion dollar program is an egregious waste of time and money, particularly at the same time that real live American troops are fighting and dying on the battlefield. Yet although this objection has a sort of visceral appeal to it (you’re spending our money on WHAT?!?) the fact is that the 15 million dollars invested in the creation of such tools is a drop in the bucket compared to the 4 BILLION dollars spent each year on military recruitment, to say nothing of the 439.3 billion dollars of annual Department of Defense expenditures. Furthermore, as stated above, the program seems to have netted some results in terms of getting people interested in the military, and it seems likely that improving the simulation would yield even better results.

A far more compelling objection, however, comes not from economics but rather from ethics. As many are quick to point out, the implicit message of videogames about war is that war is itself a videogame. To critics, this carries two significant harms. First, by showing that violence is a fun experience, such games could hypothetically desensitize youngsters to the point that killing no longer carries any moral value. This is a case of fiction being mistaken for reality. Second, and more importantly, such critics argue that videogames will dupe recruits into thinking that fighting in a war carries no costs. Once in war, such soldiers will realize that the struggle they face is hardly child’s play. As one eloquent proponent of this view writes:

Sure, the game shows soldiers die in war -- thus the "death animation." But it doesn't show the thousands more who live forever maimed, with one arm, one leg or no limbs. It doesn't show the agonizing rehabilitation that often follows. It doesn't show the mental anguish of seeing a buddy killed in front of you, or having to shoot the enemy when you can look into his eyes.

A clear case of reality being mistaken for fiction. In this view the army is unacceptably misrepresenting the reality of warfare to dupe the young into the ranks of the armed forces. Those who hold such views have often engaged in creative and sometimes harrowing protests. For example,Joseph DeLappe of the University of Nevada has recently engaged in a so-called "online gaming intervention, which involves logging onto the America's Army multiplayer server and using the text messaging system to broadcast the names of real men and women killed in Iraq. Yet although such objections seem persuasive on face, they actually fail to take into account historical and scientific perspectives. When such evidence is accounted for, both fall.

As to the first objection, the notion that videogame violence will desensitize people to real violence, scientific evidence seems highly ambivalent. As game theorist Eric Zimmerman explains, entering the videogame realm places players into a “magic circle” of sorts, in which it is understood that the normal rules of reality are temporarily rescinded. Put another way, most people know that games aren’t real. This theoretical outlook has been validated by empirical evidence, which has yet to produce any solid proof that playing violent games actually translates into committing violent acts.

And as to the second, the notion that such tactics are uniquely unfair, I would argue that the existence of cultural artifacts that glorify warfare and the soldiering life are as old as the Western tradition itself. From Homer to Halo, one finds a plethora of cultural artifacts that could be construed as not accurately reflecting warfare. In light of this fact, it seems that the particular scrutiny heaped on videogames that promote warfare seems somewhat unfair. From my perspective it seems as though a movie, book, or epic poem can promote battle as persuasively as a game. Moreover, the entire point of military recruitment IS to put a positive spin on the realities of warfare. As such, it remains to be seen why the use of somewhat unrealistic videogames is any more morally odious than the use of uplifting 30 second commercials or the newsreels of the 1940s. At this point, it seems wildly inconsistent to attack videogames while ignoring other forms of art or expression. Obviously, some would purport that videogames are qualitatively different in that they are interactive, but I would argue that in earlier ages popular fiction or movies held no less influence over the young of the era. If the soldiers recruited today don’t know the full picture on the ground, their ignorance pales in comparision to the jolt the young men of Europe received when they gleefully rushed toward World War I. Indeed, given the realities of a strong anti-establishment and anti-government ethos among our generation, it seems unfair to deny the military this tool in terms of reaching recruits in the xbox era.

virtually harmless

Of course, this is not to say that military recruitment is always perfect (or scrupulous). Yet the harms presented by offering videogames seem comparable to the harms of tv commercials or internet banner ads. Put another way, unless one is willing to call for an end to all military advertising, it is philosophically inconsistent to call for an attack specifically directed at gaming.

The broader point here, though, is that videogames ought to be treated on a fair playing field with other media. Whenever a new information technology enters wide use it has been hailed as the downfall of civilization. So far, all such predictions have proven incorrect. Some videogames are trashy, violent, and without merit, but so too are some movies, books, and plays. As such, it seems that a paradigmatic shift is needed away from attacking gaming as an institution and toward considering each game as an independent work on a par with any other text in society. Getting from here to there, however, will take a great deal of time, but such changes are already in the works. What is most remarkable about the military recruitment videogame is thus not that it is an egregious or unethical tactic but rather that it reflects the growing mainstream acceptance of videogames as a useful tool, an attitude that will doubtless gain great purchase in the decades ahead. Stay safe, DER

Images

2007-08-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

I had originally planned a long, upbeat post to mark my return, but this week I have been haunted by the image above, photographer Nina Berman’s “Marine Wedding”. The groom, former Marine sergeant Ty Ziegel, was serving in Iraq when a suicide bomb attack left him trapped under a burning vehicle, melting his features beyond recognition. The bride is his high school sweetheart.

Our present war often seems unreal. Perhaps this is because in the youtube era no media event ever seems truly real; more likely it is because with the advent of an all volunteer army only a relatively small segment of America’s population bears the ghastly brunt of our Iraqi endeavor. Sometimes, it takes images like the one above to remind us that despite the distancing effects of modern media, the costs of the war in Iraq are very, very real. I have no political commentary or witticisms to offer tonight; the image speaks for itself.

Safe Returns

2007-08-23T08:11:00.001-07:00

boundless columnist and american hero daniel rauch

After weeks of secret negotiations, the People's Republic of China has agreed to free me in exchange for the right to make unlimited bootleg copies of High School Musical 2. Once again, market solves...

BOUNDLESS is back. Expect new posts starting tommorow...

Breaking Up is Hard(ish) to Do

2007-06-15T05:33:00.000-07:00

To the readers, friends, and enemies of Boundless Rationality,
You've been great, and we've had a lot of fun together, but I think we need some time apart. It's not you, it's me. I really hope we stay friends, and I just know that someday, we'll be able to put all of this past us. You're a great readership, and someday I'm sure you'll make some blogger very happy. Always yours, DER

just please don't key my car

* In all seriousness, Boundless Rationality will be off until late August due to the author's stay in the People's Republic of China. If he is not back by then, he is most likely dead.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Superiority

2007-06-11T09:55:00.000-07:00

awww

Healthcare is already garnering a lot of attention this election cycle, as can be seen in the policy dustoff which briefly animated the last Democratic debate. This makes sense; not only does healthcare represent an increasingly large share of America’s GDP, but it’s a policy issue that is relevant to almost any conceivable voter. Additionally, due to rising costs and (perhaps) shifts in the economy, the number of American’s without health insurance is at a record high, with some 46.6 million lacking coverage. As a result, it is unsurprising that the current situation has seen a spate of proposals coming from both sides of the aisle, advocating various and sundry mixtures of market and government intervention.

Yet what makes this question particularly difficult to deal with is that even if a given policy is proposed and adopted, it seems unlikely to significantly mitigate the challenge healthcare poses. Looking to the economics of healthcare, one finds that market based solutions are particularly fraught when applied to the sector. In order for a competitive market to do its thing, consumers need to have meaningful choice and sufficient knowledge to exercise it. Yet in medicine, one literally needs to go through years of training to be able to assess which medical option is viable. Unlike, say, phone service, which can be compared on a simple heuristic and then acted on, medical care can’t be assessed by any one easy calculation. Additionally, due to the need for rapid care in many of the most critical (and costly) situations, the time to search the market for options is minimal; if you’ve just had a stroke, your family is highly unlikely to “shop around” for the cheapest emergency room.

And beyond the information problem, there is a further difficulty with the health industry, a structural problem known as Baumol’s disease. As mother Wikipedia explains:

In a range of businesses, such as the car manufacturing sector and the retail sector, workers are continually getting more productive due to technological innovations to their tools and equipment. In contrast, in some labor-intensive sectors that rely heavily on human interaction or activities, such as nursing, education, or the performing arts there is little or no growth in productivity over time. As with the string quartet example, it takes nurses the same amount of time to change a bandage, or college professors the same amount of time to mark an essay, in 2006 as it did in 1966.
Baumol's cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive and have a limited desirable provider-customer ratio, there is little growth in productivity over time. As a result, the costs of the bureaucracy will inflate quicker than the growth in the GDP.

Finally, years of good health are generally clamored for regardless of economic costs. Very few people will willingly ever down lifesaving or life extending medical care because it’s too expensive, and no serious politician would ever run on the platform of “sometimes, you just gotta let go" (though in a well written New Atlantis article, Daniel Callahan argues that some day we may need to).

As such, the US and all other nations that seek to provide healthcare to their people are dealing with a sector in which: a: markets tend to fail b: costs tend to rise irrespective (or because of) technology and c: demand is functionally infinite. As a result of this convergence, health costs have risen in both relative and absolute terms in almost every developed nation, and today the costs of health entitlements threaten to crush literally dozens of advanced industrial countries.

So what’s the solution? Unclear. I tried to think of one in these last 15 seconds and couldn’t. Naturally, there are some very good steps that can be taken at the margins, such as better information technology like PDA's as well as some introduction of competitive systems. None of these changes will qualitatively shift the nature of healthcare costs, but they will make them easier to bear. Yet in the long run, such new solutions are grossly insufficient at addressing one of the potential new problems that will soon face polities and policymakers worldwide: the rise of genetic enhancement technologies, specifically the pre-natal or even germ line imprvement of embryos.

sf cave may not be enough

Though still in its infancy (hardeharhar), the field of "designer babies" offers the promise of children that are taller, more intelligent, and better looking than they would otherwise have been. Such products will be snapped up; after all, while compulsory eugenics may carry nasty cultural connotations, optional eugenics would almost certainly find huge support (think of every genocidal parent who pays 50,000 dollars for SAT tutors, and you’ll be on the right track). The problem, however, is that such therapies are likely to be very expensive. The result is that, left unchecked, a scenario could arise in which the rich are capable of having children who are not merely economically superior to their peers but are genetically and chemically superior as well, while death becomes increasingly a lower class phenomenon.

If such an outcome occurred, it would be a disaster for any democracy. The liberal tradition is predicated on the notion that all people are roughly qualitatively equal. When the potential for large segments of society to leap past others on a fundamental biochemical level emerges, however, it threatens to short circuit years of philosophical and political progress and introduce a radical, existential threat to democracy since for the first time all people will NOT have been created equal. Put another way, the arguments for universal suffrage are not as weighty in a populace bifurcated between the unenhanced masses and a supersmart elite.

But fortunately for us, it will never get this far. Well before any long term social crises would emerge, political pressures would surely force the hand of any government to action. They say that our generation is apathetic, but if our children are being outpaced and condemned to lives of stupid servility, we will certainly take to the streets. As a result of such pressure, it seems that ultimately only one of two policies could possibly be adopted. First, (and initially more likely), government could attempt to ban such therapies. Yet such a policy seems unworkable on several grounds. First, the incentive and potential benefits on offer from such technologies is so high that many would simply have such therapies performed abroad. Indeed, in an era of lucrative medical tourism it’s tough to believe that no Thailand, India or China will emerge to accept the dollars of affluent Western parents. Additionally, however, such a ban may not be advisable from a policy point of view. After all, if other nations permit enhancement then their citizens would gain comparative advantage over ours, with a commensurate loss of influence down the road. Finally, however, there’s the notion of parental choice. US courts have long held that parents should be given wide leeway in how they choose to raise their children, and by stepping in and preventing such enhancement a policy of prohibition would infringe greatly upon this tradition.

But if a ban won’t work and an unregulated sector ends democracy, then the only viable solution is state subsidization. Put another way, the government of the future will need to offer the “right to designer babies”, and somehow foot the bill. This will not be easy, but we’ve not been helping ourselves; indeed, to my knowledge, no government or think tank projection has yet figured in the costs of providing politically necessary genetic enhancement. Truth is, no one even knows what such costs would be. But they will exist; depending on the exact combination of technological, economic and social factors involved, one can imagine a situation in which the modern concept of the state is radically redefined to that of hospital first, fortress second. In such a world, liberal democracy could exist only by adopting a social contract protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of superority for all of its people. In light of this developent, more Palm Pilots in hospitals simply isn't going to cut it. And so, while we tune into the debates and squabbles about medicine this election cycle, we must all bear in mind that what’s coming next could prove far, far worse, and that we need to start in on some very hard questions.

BOUNDLESS has added you as a friend

2007-06-08T07:15:00.000-07:00

will you accept?

Today I’d like to revisit my occasional dalliances into the consequences of the internet on politics. While I in the past I’ve primarily focused on youtube, I think that based on a certain spate of beachfront photos its best that I turn to the question of social networking sites. No one can deny that facebook and myspace have become facts of life in America; while there are many anecdotes and facts that can attest to this the one that is most stunning is the fact that 61% of 13 to 17 year olds have personal profiles on MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, or other such social networks. Because of this, the social and therefore political ramifications of this medium are enormous, and deserve to be considered fully. In my mind, social networks have two primary effects on politics, both of which stem from the unique nature of the phenomenon but operate on different levels.

First, on a broad level, such websites serve to bring likeminded people together. By reducing the cost of showing one’s political affiliation to 3 or 4 mouse clicks, sites like Facebook allow people to join or create groups that previously could never have existed. Because of this, groups on facebook or myspace that catch fire tend to become quite large quite fast (see Brody Ruckus and his two special friends). For enterprising pols, this may well be a way to build grassroots support on the cheap. Indeed, the wide spread of such networks allows elections down to the level of High School student government to have public web support. Additionally, because invites to such groups or causes nominally come from friends (as opposed to random web banners), they seem more personal, leading to greater response rates.

So is facebook the future of participatory democracy? Alas, I think not. In fact, while it is still early, I would actually argue that in the long run social networks could end up harming political participation. Let me explain. The first problem is what I call the action-gap, namely the disconnect between facebook participation in a cause and real world participation. When someone joins the facebook group End Genocide in Darfur, it remains to be seen how, exactly, they are achieving this end. Now, arguably, such groups serve to facilitate or coordinate real world happenings (see Mark Jia’s brilliant use of facebook in support of Barack Obama). Indeed, without the rise of facebook, Boundless’ regular readership would likely plunge from 7 to 3. Yet even the greatest optimist would have to admit that many, perhaps most, of the people who actually do things in the real world would do so regardless. Its just really tough for me to imagine someone who wasn’t going to go to a rally in DC, then got invited to a facebook group, and then because of that group decided to go.

And against this marginal gain one must consider the potentially devastating effects that facebook et. al. could have on political participation. By bringing likeminded people together into tiny, fragmented communities of interest, such services decrease the time and thought devoted to hearing alternate viewpoints. When I can choose my friends and content across the political spectrum, its quite tempting to tune out other voices. A few years back a Time magazine article referred to this phenomenon as the ipodization of America, a reference to the fact that with the rise of the MP3 player no one has to hear anything they don’t want to. But while the ipod is great for music, its awful for a polity in which compromise needs to be reached. As facebook rises, however, the already severely truncated time that gets spent in the intellectual commons is sure to shrink.

And this is the optimistic scenario. After all, if myspace drives us to polarization, this means that at least its driven us somewhere. What seems even more likely, though, is that this will be yet another distraction that will drive down youth voter rates in the long run. Facebook takes time. While not a full fledged addict, I can safely say that I’ve lost perhaps 2 weeks of my life in aggregate this year to the book. Admit it or not, you’ve probably done the same or worse. Furthermore, I don’t think this is time that is cutting into TV, videogames, or anything else that keeps people from getting engaged. Instead, I think that at least a large part of facebook time came from something productive. As such, it is possible that in the long run even as facebook better coordinates activists it will polarize them as well, while the moderate middle retreats even farther from the political sphere, a seemingly distant place when compared to a glittering retinue of friend requests and pokes.

he won't vote. trust me.

But enough about the broad level; lets talk humiliation. Particularly humiliation of future candidates. Particularly humiliation of future candidates who have embarrassing photos posted online. The second broad consequence of social networking is the surge of information available about anyone who went to college after, say, 2000 (though there are certainly older users out there). Much of this information, furthermore, is in the form of photos that are…umm… somewhat unsuitable for general consumption. The question, then, is this: what happens when the first major senate candidate or congressman has to answer for himself covered in vomit while wearing a dick in a box, or doing cocaine while onlookers do the dirty bird, or any number of other scenarios? Will anyone be “facebooked” the way, say, George Allen was “youtubed” ? Fortunately, the response is more optimistic here; I actually don’t think any serious political damage can be done by any photos and little can be done by written words.

The first cause for relief is the problem of gathering information.. Most people often change the content of their profiles and will sometimes outright delete them when they enter the “real” world. This impermanence, combined with the fact that no one knows just who will be a public figure in 30 years time, means that in order for someone to be “facebooked” someone would need to be out there right now saving digital copies of everyone’s facebook every 2 weeks. Even if one restricted this search to, say, Harvard Yale and Princeton, this means tens of thousands of profiles being constantly checked and copied. Unless someone has software that does such searches automatically ( a possibility, but unlikely), then the sort of search needed for such comprehensive “facebooking” to occur is very, very low. Additionally, even if photos did come to light, most sketch photographs will fall into two categories; youthful indiscretions most of the nation engaged in and will accept, or serious crimes. I think photos of anyone doing anything up to smoking a joint and maybe even using cocaine would be totally non-lethal, especially since social networking will doubtless become very ingrained. By contrast, if its very much worse than that, (I don’t even know…erm…crystal meth party?) said person probably won’t be running anyway. Finally, though, with the advent of photoshop, individual still images won’t be given anywhere near the credit they are now. Any candidate caught in a photo could plausibly claim that the picture was edited and that the crack pipe in his hands was, in fact, a tennis racket. Go figure.

no one will believe this actually took place

Interestingly, the more deleterious harms to candidates may actually come from written comments. With the casual use of “gay” and “fag” and general pejoratives, for instance, it seems likely that some future candidate could have to answer for statements that, while not necessarily homophobic, certainly won’t endear him to the gay community. There are many other such examples, but it seems like if reliable text could be proven it may have more of an impact. On the other hand, words and phrases are even easier to fake and thus some sort of very impressive proof of their veracity would be needed for them to stick.

So ultimately, while facebook may harm our polity and the broader level it seems candidates have nothing to fear. In a made up world, no one really believes anything, and thus the very medium that threatens the candidates creates the social conditions where that threat could plausibly be ignored. Phew.

Hill's Big Win

2007-06-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

hill is the dawg, the bid bad dawwwggg

Today I would unsurprisingly like to talk about last night’s presidential debate. On the whole, the most striking feature of this round of rhetorical fisticuffs was the improvement almost every candidate displayed. The dems stepped up, and as a group there were some fairly impressive displays. Some of my favorites:

Chris Dodd on healthcare: Yes, that Chris Dodd. While so far relatively undistinguished in this race, Dodd’s response here was brilliant and merits further attention. While other candidates went into the (relative) nuances of their healthcare plans, Chris was the only one to talk about the United State’s pitiful infant mortality statistics and life expectancy when compared to the rest of the developed world. Whoever wins in 2008 should never stop hammering this home; not only is it a glaring, visceral indictment of the crises at hand, but it also allows Democrats a potentially devastating response against pro-life opponents. By styling themselves as the true party of life and infant rights, democrats could turn the familiar rhetoric of the GOP against it and in the process return the debate about healthcare to the foreground, as opposed to a policy issue that often seems somewhat dry and removed. Great work Dodd.

Kucinich on healthcare: Though his calls for a single payer system aren’t as politically useful or tactically exciting as Dodd’s response, they drew far more applause. For someone who is not considered a mainstream candidate Dennis gave a cogent, compact response that was fairly impressive.

Richardson on gay marriage: While on a whole the Dems were fairly impressive in support of gay rights (at least with regard to don’t ask don’t tell), it was Richardson who went all out, calling for hate crimes legislation and full equality. Obviously, being a governor allowed Richardson some leeway in terms of never facing votes on such issues, but his response here was very brave nonetheless.

Obama’s interruption: When the field was asked to raise their hands if they thought English should be America’s official language (a throwaway question given the makeup of the primary electorate), Obama turned what could’ve been a fairly dead moment to his advantage by stepping in and attacking the question itself as divisive and unhelpful. This line drew applause but, more importantly, allowed Obama to appear to have taken the momentum in the debate. Indeed, if one watches carefully, they can even see Hillary trying to interject after Barack has spoken, suggesting that she recognizes the coup that has just been executed and wants desperately to follow up.

Biden on Darfur: Joe Biden was very much on his game, and while he may have put off the audience with the style of his Darfur response, the substance was daring and largely correct. Pledging to boycott the Olympics and contemplate direct military action is a brave stance, and I really hope he is rewarded for it.

field

Of course, no debate is perfect, and I was disappointed with some minor things and major candidates. In order:

Edwards generally: A fine job, but nothing spectacular. Edwards is showing himself to be a proficient candidate, but he did not do what he needed to do in terms of breaking the top two dynamic of Clinton and Obama. Despite his usual polish, I was strangely uninspired.

Gravel: Uggghhh…unlike Ron Paul, who is often correct and offers something interesting and substantive to the debate, the Democrats resident fringe-monkey just seems like a very, very bad candidate. He’s not sticking it to the man, just doing a mediocre job of imitating him.

Obama’s fluency: So this is the speech junky in me, but if Obama never says “um” or “uh” again, it will be too soon. While some speculate that he is doing this to be” one of the people” (looking at you Dave Christie), he’s coming off not as humble but as uninformed and unprepared. The fact is that the set watching right now are hardcore activists and their hapless relatives; as such, its far more important to demonstrate command of rhetoric and policy then to express aw-shucksisms. Dramatic pauses and verbal crutches may help you seem authentic during a 50-minute policy speech at UNH, but when you need to get through in 30 prime time seconds they are an unaffordable liability.

But of course, I’m dodging the elephant in the room, namely Hillary Clinton. While I hesitate to say it, Hillary is a spectacular debater. Her performance was awesome, and has eclipsed Romney’s in my mind. As a speaker she almost never broke her flow, drew more laughs than her opponents, turned every question to her advantage, and had more applause than anyone else on the stage. Among the many moments that broke her way, however, I was particularly impressed by her responses to don’t ask don’t tell and to the question of whether she would bomb Bin Laden even if it meant killing civilians. When asked if she thought don’t ask don’t tell was wrong ( a not so subtle trap designed to turn her against her husband), Hillary’s explanation that don’t ask don’t tell was a transition and that now times have changed was a textbook example of a nuanced answer expressed concisely and effectively. Her answer here was so effective, in fact, that she had time left over to wax eloquent on the contributions of gay and lesbian warriors to the fight, praise that seemed less stilted then much of what followed. Yet the most devastatingly effective moment came when the field was asked whether they would bomb Bin Laden even if it meant killing civilians. While some candidates instinctively jumped up to say yes, and others gave their best impressions of children caught robbing a cookie jar, Hillary spoke up and said “ well it depends how many”, then seized the moment and attacked all such hypothetical questions as unfair. This drew applause. That Clinton was able to call out an overly simplistic question as unrealistic AND get crowd recognition is extraordinary, and displays a talent that I previously did not expect of Ms. Clinton.

O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He liked Hillary Clinton.

So what does all this mean? Staring at the field, I could not help but get the feeling that the race may soon be Clinton’s to lose. Basically, the scenario in which I’d envisioned an Obama/Edwards/Richardson surprise involved the debates being turning points in favor of the underdog that would shift the punditocracy and tear away once and for all the aura of inevitability. Indeed, prior to the first debate the stage was set for Obama to take the lead, with some polls actually showing him ahead of Clinton just before. But all such narratives depended on one thing; Hillary losing a debate. So far she’s 0-2, and if anyone else wants the nod in 2008, they’re going to have to become much better rhetoricians or find some way to win at the grassroots level and circumvent the national debates.

This post represents my work in capacity with the Princeton College Democrats.

Terrorism: Ron Paul vs. Giuliani @ SC Debate

2007-06-02T08:41:00.001-07:00

Video to the post

5 things I learned from Rudy and Ron

2007-06-02T07:54:00.000-07:00

lessons from rudy's day of glory

1 month into the GOP debate season, we've already seen quite a few meaningful/disconcerting/hilarious encounters. Of these, however, none has had the same purchase as New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's scathing rebuttal to congressman and perpetual court jester Ron Paul. The video clip in question is above, but the transcript of the encounter is:

MR. GOLER: Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as -- almost immediately, sir. Are you out of step with your party? Is your party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination?

REP. PAUL: Well, I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Senator Robert Taft didn't even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy -- no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.

Just think of the tremendous improvement -- relationships with Vietnam. We lost 60,000 men. We came home in defeat. Now we go over there and invest in Vietnam. So there's a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and following the Constitution.

And my argument is that we shouldn't go to war so carelessly. (Bell rings.) When we do, the wars don't end.

MR. GOLER: Congressman, you don't think that changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?

REP. PAUL: What changed?

MR. GOLER: The non-interventionist policies.

REP. PAUL: No. Non-intervention was a major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East -- I think Reagan was right.

We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?

REP. PAUL: I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, "I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier." They have already now since that time -- (bell rings) -- have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary.

MR. GIULIANI: Wendell, may I comment on that? That's really an extraordinary statement. That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. (Applause, cheers.)

And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Congressman?

REP. PAUL: I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.

They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if we were -- if other foreign countries were doing that to us?

MR. GIULIANI: Can I have 30 seconds, please?

MR. : No, no, no, wait a second. Let's -- we'll all get 30 seconds.

(Cross talk.)

MR. GIULIANI: They are coming --

(Cross talk.)

MR. : We all want 30 seconds of time --

For the truly bored, full transcript can be found here.

rudy giuliani

Generally speaking, this entanglement has been seen as a huge win for Giuliani. Having been perceived as a loser in the first debate, Rudy needed to make up for lost time. Indeed, poll numbers have of late shown McCain creeping ahead, leading many to wonder if Giuliani’s once stratospheric lead was about to be neutralized. With this pivot, however, Rudy was said to have shown himself to be tough on terrorism while revealing Ron Paul to be a coot. That said, there are other crucial details that merit attention beyond the broad narrative of this event that should probably be considered. Five, to be precise:

I. Rules are made to be broken: The first lesson of this exchange is that judicious rule breaking can work in your favor. Giuliani’s behavior during this exchange was an egregious violation of protocol…and the fans loved him for it. Note how at the end of the clip he even asks for another 30 seconds, leading the commentators to outright chastise him. But no matter. People like rebellion, they like spontaneity, and they like passion. Incidentally, Jim Cramer (of “Mad Money” fame), recently wrote a dead on piece in New York magazine along similar lines, saying that the popularity of his show is due in large part to a desire to move away from the scripted and toward the insane. At this point, I could wax eloquent on the profound connection between the Real World Road Rules and the GOP field, but this is neither the time nor the place (yet).

II. Except when they’re not (and they won’t be for quite some time): But one of the other lessons of this exchange is the need to wait for the right moment before breaking the rules. There’s a fine, fine line between being seen as passionate and righteously outraged and being seen as pushy, arrogant, or domineering. Trust me on this one. Right off the bat, this means that a candidate must be exceedingly careful when deciding when to jump ship and do something outside normal bounds. Generally speaking, the only sorts of statements that would allow this are ad hom or personal attacks, i.e. if Romney faces bigotry at some point. Here Rudy had the unique advantage of being able to use 9/11 as a personal issue, one so personal that no one would suspect that this response had doubtless been planned prior to the debate. What makes the Giuliani move especially brilliant, though, is that no one else can break the rules “spontaneously” again. Even if McCain overhears a dumb response to torture or Brownback hears someone defend evolution as “science”, they won’t dare call out for fear of being perceived as trying to “pull a Rudy”. And when spontaneous acts don’t appear spontaneous, they invariably turn people off. Just ask Castiglione...

III. Ron Paul is crazy: In every conventional way possible, Ron Paul is a man unhinged. He often appears to have little to no political experience, isn’t particularly charismatic and seems often to literally be in the wrong party. When he attributed 9/11 to the bombing of Iraq in the 1990’s, he made a statement that seemed, and felt, insane. I don’t know why he’s running for president, but I doubt its to win. Others are having their own doubts as well, and many GOP strategists are suggesting that he be bolted off stage and hushed. But this would be a terrible idea; beyond strengthening the other candidates on stage I’ve no doubt that Paul’s low level insanity brings in or holds literally millions of viewers who would otherwise be watching My Super Sweet 16 or setting fires outside (including yours truly)

IV. Ron Paul is not as crazy as you think: Earlier this month a friend of mine said that if you actually listen to what Ron Paul says, he’s not as crazy as he seemed at first. Incredulous, I decided to see for myself (in fact, this intellectual excursion was the initial impetus for this post). Much to my chagrin, I found that much of what Paul said in the debate was, in fact, logical, and that many of his views deserve to be seriously considered. Let’s start with Paul’s thought experiment, which asked us to imagine that China was building bases in Mexico instead of the US building them in Iraq before asking us how we would feel about it. The notion that we should evaluate foreign policy decisions through the eyes of others, at least as one factor in the process, is one that is sorely neglected in public debates. Such a viewpoint isn’t just about popularity contests at the UN lunch room, its about American dollars and lives. If the US is hated worldwide, then our “soft power” or ability to influence other nations to go along with our policies, is greatly reduced. For the importance of soft power, see any of Joseph Nye’s works (including, of course, Soft Power). As to the idea of non-intervention, while it is not a platform I personally believe in, I think that it is one of the more defensible foreign policy directions that someone could take. Implicit in Paul’s rant is the notion that, given time, free markets will liberalize without creating hatred (see Vietnam). As such, the idea that the US should avoid any major wars, keep up its power and defend global capitalism is an alluring vision, especially for those who are one with the Friedman (Thomas, not Milton). Yet even Paul’s most outlandish statement, the idea that US intervention in the middle east contributed to terrorism, is one that is worthy of at least some discussion. After all, Bin Laden’s initial demands were focused heavily on the US presence in Saudi Arabia, a presence necessitated by (you guessed it) the need for constant bombing of Iraq during the 1990’s/

don't. use. meth.

Of course, this is in no way a suggestion that the US deserved the attacks of September 11th, or that those attacks can in any way be morally or politically justified. Yet from where I sit, it seems that Paul’s real sin isn’t his viewpoint but his inability to phrase it correctly. In many ways, this is structural; the fact is that in a 30 second response one can’t express Joseph Nye’s entire book or explain the nuance of global public opinion. As such, candidates basically have 2 choices in foreign policy responses when they stand on the stage; go simple, or go home. Unfortunately, anything that even implies that September 11th was in any way okay has a whole lot of explaining to do, and if any such statements get made in 30 seconds, they will doubtless appear, well, crazy.

V. Debates don’t matter yet: But finally, and most importantly, Giuliani’s decline has not been reversed. Though in the past few days he has held relatively steady, Rudy’s slip from his high in March continues unabated. There are several possibilities. It is possible, for instance, that Giuliani would have slipped even farther if not for his brilliant response or that his newfound abortion position trumps even terrorism as an influential political factor. Yet while all of these are possible I think the most obvious, and likely, explanation is that people by and large don’t yet care. Think about who tunes in to a presidential debate a year and a half before the fact and 10 months before the primaries; generally speaking, these will be party activists or dedicated observers who will be making their decisions based on many factors, of which the debate is just one. Because of this, no matter what sort of verbal smackdown a candidate applies, there simply aren’t many voters who are a. interested enough in the race to watch this early and b. fickle enough to decide who to vote for based on one youtube moment. As such, the true lesson here may well be that even as the punditocracy titters and gawks at every moment of the race, the American public isn’t quite ready or willing to tune in.

With that, I and the rest of the political junkies avidly await the next debate, whether to learn new lessons or to see Paul finally get bear-maced and dragged off stage by Dog the Bounty Hunter. Cheers, DER

This post represents my work in capacity with the Princeton college democrats.

The Wrong Sort of Equality

2007-05-29T03:40:00.000-07:00

not the real issue

On this very early morning (can’t sleep at home) I’ve decided to write briefly on what I feel to be the most important foreign policy question that should be facing 2008 candidates. Based on the media’s response the answer would seem overwhelmingly to be the war in Iraq. Each new motion, resolution and bill brings a volley of news reports and sends analysts into a frenzy parsing the actions of each candidate. Iraq is certainly in crises, and with each new suicide bomb or IED this is brought again into sharp focus. Yet although the war will almost certainly be around in 2008, it will in all likelihood be too late for any substantive policy change to take effect. After all, in many ways the damage has been done. Today Iraq represents a colossal terrorist training ground, a place for the global mujahadeen set to get in some practice against Western troops in Bahgdad and Haditha before applying their lessons to New York and London. Ethnic tensions could well lead to a civil war and potentially lead to genocide. Health conditions have spiraled downward, and today the life expectancy of a child is falling faster in Iraq than anywhere else in the world, with 1 in 8 dying from violence or illness before their 5th birthday. Finally, and most importantly, some 3000 American troops and perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been lost to the conflict, men women and children that the victor of 2008 can never bring back. And so, when the commander in chief inherits Bush’s then 5 year old war, he will find that any policy course he takes will not erase most of the pernicious impacts of Iraq.

At this point, then, it seems that America’s democratic process is engaged in a sunk cost fallacy writ large. Though the war in Iraq is horrific, it is the consequence of decisions made years ago that are even today irreversible. Indeed, this truth has become fairly apparent if one looks to the actual Iraq policies of each serious 2008 candidate. Considering the positions held by all parties in question, one finds two broad sorts of boundaries. For the Democrats part, no one has dared to suggest and immediate withdraw. Barack Obama has called for a cap of 130,000 troops with a “phased” exit over an unannounced time period, Edwards has called for an immediate reduction of 40,000 (the anti surge?), and Hillary Clinton has called for “eventual withdrawal” (as opposed to, say, statehood for Iraq). While all of these positions allow for rhetorical claims of opposition to the war, none changes the reality on the ground. On the Republicans side, by contrast, we find no one in favor of seriously or qualitatively changing the way the war will be fought. Though some (Giuliani, McCain) support Bush’s surge and others do not, the general consensus seems to be that Iraq is badly off, that “strategy must change” and that “security is important”. Yet while all have spouted off familiar platitudes, none has dared to commit the US to any formal time period or timeframe to stay. What this suggests is that should the GOP win in 2008, the result will be a scramble to “declare victory” and then reduce troop levels as much as feasible. What this means is that whether the oath of office is taken by Obama, Clinton, Romney, McCain, Giuliani or Edwards (or most of the others), the US will be doing roughly the same thing; fighting a messy war while very slowly leaving.

But if our next president can’t significantly change Iraq, what should he focus on? What is the most decisive foreign policy question that should be posed again and again to our crop of hopefuls? For me the answer seems clear: what are you prepared to do to keep the United States as the world superpower.

Today America’s power is slipping in the world. Since our height at the end of the Cold War, our economic and military influence has been increasingly challenged by up-and-coming rival powers. As globalization makes the world increasingly prosperous it has reduced America’s advantage on all fronts. Many both inside and outside of the US have seen this as positive. The argument here is that a unilateral US must be checked by nations like China, Iran, and Venezuela in order to ensure a diversity of views in the global arena. Once the US has been knocked from its high horse then all the world will unite and everyone will have a fair say. To us in the US, this seems to make intuitive sense; after all, it just doesn’t seem right that only one nation or group of nations should have their voices heard. Right?

But not all ideas are created equally. In the West we have adopted a framework that defends freedom, tolerance, and the liberty for each individual to best pursue their own potential. These are the ideas that have animated documents like the US constitution and the UN universal declaration of human rights, and have improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. What makes these norms unique, furthermore, is that they know no racial or cultural bounds; given time and adopted to local conditions, they are capable of providing a framework through which everyone can live together and prosper. Yet against this set of universally applicable beliefs rests the frameworks of the aspiring powers, namely the rule of self-determination. Within this view each nation ought to follow the Las Vegas rule: What happens here, stays here.

To see a preview of what such a world would be like, one need look no further than China’s actions over the past decade. One of the reasons for China’s growing influence has been that it does not “preach” to other nations as the US and the west have seemed to. Yet the reason this is so is that for China each nation should be allowed to do whatever they please, and provided they leave China alone they will not be bothered about it. On one hand, this means that if China gains the upper hand they certainly won’t actively try to crush democracies in the West. Unlike the USSR, for instance, China has no real global ideological agenda at this time. Yet the flip side of this coin is that just as Geneva will be allowed to keep their democracy, the janjaweed will be allowed to keep their genocide. In the era of China, Iran, and Venezuela the world that will emerge will shift from the ideal of individual equality to the ideal of civilizational equality, one in which genocide, slavery, secret police and oppression of women shares equal weight with we the people.

genocide doesn't deserve equality

Of course, none of this is to say that the US has been perfect as global steward. Far from it. Abuses like Abu Ghrahib and mistakes like the war in Iraq have justly sullied us in the eyes of the world, and we deserve to be held accountable. Additionally, with the rise of a united Europe, it seems likely that the US could someday get the best of both worlds; a multipolar strategic environment where nations hold each other in check while united in their fundamental beliefs. Finally, as time goes on, the liberalizing forces of the global market and the internet have begun to slowly change attitudes worldwide. China is increasingly a more responsible global citizen, in large part because in the status quo it must conform to a structure of values and institutions “imposed” by the US. If another few decades of such “imposition” can occur, pesky little things like freedom of press or human rights may actually come into vogue in their own right, at which point a power shift would be far less pernicious. Yet while that world is promising, it is not the world that will hit us if the US loses pre-eminence in the next couple of years. For the foreseeable future the choice is between a US power that imperfectly pursues the right sort of equality or a vacuum that strives only to protect the wrong sort of equality, one which presupposes no notion of rights, freedoms, or values that are inherent to human life. In such a world even if US decline is, in fact, inevitable, we should be doing our darndest to slow it down.

And so, candidates of 2008, I pose today’s question: how can we forestall this disaster? How can we keep our economy competitive, get our military home and repaired as quickly as possible, tighten our relationships with other likeminded nations, and ensure our entitlement system doesn’t drown us? How will we make sure that the voice of freedom and rights does not become merely one among many, but instead continues to be held out as an ideal applicable to all peoples. That’s my question to you, and I feel that I, and the rest of the nation, and the rest of the world, deserve an answer as soon as possible.

Cheers, DER

Let's Get Krunk

2007-05-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

WHAT?! WHAT?! YEAHHH

With my first year of college behind me, I thought today would be an opportune time to talk about America’s second favorite college pastime: getting drunk (the first, of course, being learning). For most American college students (so says alcoholEDU), drinking is certainly part of college life. Most colleges, for their part, have adapted, either through zealous, religiously motivated rage (looking at you Fordham), to general permissiveness. The most common arrangement based on my travels this year seems to be a sort of rough campus social contract whereby drinking is okay provided it is done in private and in relatively small groups or in designated areas. As a result, students of such colleges often get to experience, at least in some degree, what the world would look like if the drinking age reverted to 18. Generally speaking, it looks good. While there are certainly those who become particularly irresponsible (my personal favorite such anecdote ends with a Princeton sophomore shattering and then eating most of his own cellphone), it seems unlikely that they would be any more responsible at 21. Less distracted by chasing all alcohol use at all times, campus police can focus their resources on more serious problems or the few instances of alcohol use that are genuinely seen as pernicious (such as, say, distilling moonshine). Meanwhile, a huge swath of students who did not drink much in high school for fear of legal consequences is able to enjoy this activity, and to experience something that is, generally speaking, a great deal of fun.

If this seems like a rosy picture, it is. As a result of the fact that college appears to function fairly normally with alcohol, many students of the more activist bent become convinced that the drinking age really should be 18. And they seem to have a point. After all, the fact that one can vote or own a business but can’t have a beer to celebrate either does seem intuitively strange. Countries like Canada, Britain, and Australia all allow 18 year olds to drink, and none has ground to a halt or exploded (incidentally, Jamaica’s drinking age is literally 0, though arguably that nation has both ground to a halt and exploded). Unsurprisingly, then, facebook and political groups such as 18not21.org have sprung up to channel this angst. And though it will never be our generation’s Civil Rights movement, the fight to allow 18 year olds to drink seems to be a correct one to our generation; after all, it pits the seemingly rational and just policy choice against the “political will” of old, stodgy politicians who just need to loosen up. How could it be wrong?

For a long time, I shared the above position. It did seem strange that the right to drink was one of the only ones not gained at majority, and it was bizarre that the US differed so greatly from the rest of the world. So, by default, my position was also one of mild contempt toward the law while flouting its tenants on the weekends, weekdays, and several mornings. Indeed, while I would never be the one to hold the picket sign for drinker’s rights, I was gleefully willing to view my own jaunts to the streets as per formative criticisms of an unjust law. Earlier this year, however, I began to look at the issue more carefully, and after discussing it with several people smarter than myself and thinking about it for a while, I began to see that perhaps there’s a logic to 21.

positive consequence of alcohol use

The first salient objection I heard to lowering the drinking age is that of trickle down. When the drinking age is 21 everyone in college generally has access to alcohol as most people have at least one junior/senior friend. Because of this, combined with difficulties of enforcement, if the drinking age is set at 21 society must know that 18 year old will regularly drink, an outcome that seems fairly okay. When the age is pushed to 18, however, it causes major problems within the US context since it means that one quarter of every high school can now legally acquire alcohol. At this point, the trickle down is not to 18 but rather to 14, where the harms of drinking are far more pronounced. Biologically, all the things DARE warns about actually happen (as opposed to in more developed 18 year olds), while judgment is, generally speaking, dismal. For my part, as a high school freshman I was barely competent to find my locker and not set fire to myself; in an environment of regular and easy alcohol consumption I have no idea how I would have turned out.

The standard response to this is something like: “ Oh wow; high school freshman drinking. Never heard of that before”, generally followed by a snicker as said objector thinks they’re the first person to have come up with the barb in question. Yet truth be told, I feel a good number of high school students don’t start drinking until well into their high school careers in large part because one needs a 21 year old friend (or parent) to buy liquor. After all, although the age bracket of HS is arbitrary, the fact is that most people don’t have friends 7 years older than them who they would trust to hook them up with alcohol. Additionally, proximity to the line justifies people a lot of the time. For example, if a 19 year old drinks the fact that they are just 48 months away from legality makes it seem less wrong than if they were, say, 6 years out. If the drinking age is 18, then suddenly its just weird when a high school sophomore can’t get drunk regularly since they are, after all, just a couple of years out.

Additionally, some would argue that in other nations this is considered an acceptable risk. That said, if one looks more carefully they’ll find international examples are not all that applicable. If the US had a culture like that of France, where drinking was introduced gradually since childhood, binge drinking almost never occurred and beer ads were far less amusing, then the trickle down effect is far less noticeable. Additionally, since many European nations end secondary schooling at 16, younger drinking ages don’t necessarily mean a trickle down. In Canada, where the system is fairly similar, the drinking age is often 19 for that very reason.

Yet beyond the trickle down, there is a far more important and decisive reason for the law; namely that of driving. On one hand, America is an auto culture. The suburbs and exurbs in which most of us live cannot be navigated without a car, and beyond pragmatics our national romance with the automobile is a deeply engrained one. Because of this, every state in the union allows 18 year olds to drive, with most allowing driving rights several years earlier.

Yet although 18 year olds are empowered to drive, they’re not terribly good at it. Beyond the feeling of immortality et. al., it turns out that the brain structures that house crucial functions like judgment that are necessary for driving don’t fully form until one is 22 or 23. Such research has been used elsewhere, with one example being arguments that the death penalty shouldn’t be applied to 19 year olds as they are not fully capable of recognizing right and wrong. Along these lines, nueroscientists like the University of Pennslyvania's Rueben Gur have actually argued that voting rights should be restricted to those 23 and older. And while this biological evidence is compelling in the laboratory, in the 1970s it proved deadly on America’s highways.

The last time 18 year olds were allowed to drink; the result was a veritable surge of driving deaths. When one combines the legal alcohol BAC (.10 at the time) combined with brain structures already ill suited to driving, the result was thousands of highway fatalities. Additionally, as all 18 year olds could legally drink the amount of active drunk driving within the age group skyrocketed. Thus, the “political will” to change the drinking age came not from evil politicians trying to deprive college students of fun for their own pleasure but instead from the pressure group like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, groups created from thousands of individual tragedies. Thus far, the plan appears to be working; a recent study suggests that something like a thousand lives a year are saved solely by the existance of higher age laws, to say nothing of the many more cases where one would be illegally drunk more often or in which alcohol use may not have been the decisive factor but was a crucial contributing cause.

negative consequence of alcohol use

And so, with new evidence in hand, it seems that in the US context a drinking age of 18 is simply not tenable. Barring super-strict penalties for drunk driving it seems that allowing those whose brains have not fully developed to drive while moderately intoxicated is an unacceptable cost to society. So, while arguments about the disconnect between age of majority and age of drinking are intuitively compelling, they fail to recognize the unique biological harms in question. If suffrage for 18 year olds killed 1,000 Americans a year, voting rights would come at 21, too.

Back in Buisiness

2007-05-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

Boundless 又聪明,又漂亮

大考试以前我艇忙的，可是现在我不是喝 The Purp, 就是跟 vapid prostitutes 一快吃龙虾。

Boundless is back.

You know the drill

2007-05-07T23:31:00.000-07:00

Spring Exams have arrived again. Not failing out > saving the world with my blog. You know the drill. Back on 5/26, DER

by the time exams end, he'll be unemployed