Silent Dogs at the Shutdown

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
  --"Silver Blaze"

The late government shutdown  took a good whack at conventional wisdom in Washington. We've been hearing for some time that no matter how badly the Republican majority in the House behaves, nothing can be done about it. The Republicans, you see, have gerrymandered the congressional map so expertly that there is no chance they can be thrown out until after the next redistricting in 2020. Oops, maybe there is.

The conventional story never really hung together for me; I could never figure out how the arithmetic was supposed to work. When you gerrymander, you want to get as many seats as possible for a given number of voters on your side.  As Sam Wang explains it:

Gerrymandering is not hard. The core technique is to jam voters likely to favor your opponents into a few throwaway districts where the other side will win lopsided victories, a strategy known as “packing.” Arrange other boundaries to win close victories, “cracking” opposition groups into many districts.

That makes sense. It implies, though, that your side doesn't get safe seats--the other side does, while your side gets "close victories." There's a trade-off between maximizing the number of seats and maximizing the safety of each seat. As long as the are some moderate voters who might go either way, "close victories" are going to be nail-biters.

But are there any moderate voters left? Democrats need a swing of 18 seats to take control of the House. A quick check of the Cook Political Report (scroll down after you jump) reveals that 17 Republicans in the House were elected from districts that voted for Obama in 2012. Another dozen come from districts than went for Romney by two points or less. It doesn't take much of a shift away from Republicans to flip the House.

In the survey linked above, Public Policy Polling presumably was using this reasoning by polling in districts of the most vulnerable Republicans. They found that seventeen Republican representatives would lose to a "generic" (i.e., unnamed) Democrat, and another four trail the generic Democrat when voters are reminded that the representative voted for a government shutdown.

If you examine the PPP poll more closely, there are some odd things about it that might prevent one from putting a lot of faith in it. (For example, take a look at California 21, which according to Cook, Obama carried by 11 points.) But there's plenty of other evidence that things are not going well for Republicans. Both Gallup and the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll show that approval of the Republican Party is at its lowest point since they began asking the question. Granted, it's still a long way to the midterm elections. but if I were a Republican in an Obama district, I'd definitely be pretty nervous.

What is strange about the whole shutdown crisis was the dog that didn't bark: "moderate" Republicans. We heard quite a bit from the press about the "suicide caucus" of 80 Republicans who pushed Speaker Boehner into the shutdown. Those people probably are electorally invulnerable; the shameless Randy Neugebauer, for example, comes from from a Texas district where Romney got 74 percent of the votes in 2014.

But what about the representatives from districts where Obama won or nearly won? Clearly a lot of them are in jeopardy from the Republican collapse in popularity. Why didn't they protest publicly? A few have, such as Peter King (district: 52% for Obama). But even King voted for the shutdown, and later refused to sign a discharge petition that would have permitted a new vote. Why? Why didn't the self-preservation caucus speak up? Why didn't they just say no?

All I can imagine is that even representatives in fairly liberal districts face a threat from the Tea Party in the Republican primary. That leaves a lot of Republicans in a pretty tough place (call it the Straits of Mitt), having to survive both a primary challenge from the right and a general-election challenge from the left.

Curiously, one of the few pundits to pick up on the key role of the "moderates" is Paul Krugman. He concludes, however, "The biggest problem we as a nation face right now is not the extremism of Republican radicals, which is a given, but the cowardice of Republican non-extremists..." That's like saying the biggest problem we as a nation face is that pigs lack wings. The problem is not that "moderates" lack fearlessness, which is normally lacking in politicians; it's that they are poised between two fears, of the primary and the general election.

One would think that their professional colleagues in the House would have some sympathy for their plight, perhaps even some understanding of what's necessary to hold on to a majority, but the rookies seem completely clueless.“It’s pretty hard when he has a circle of 20 people that step up every day and say, ‘Can we surrender today, Mr. Speaker? Can we just go away? Can we make it easy?’” said [Kansas Republican Rep. Tim] Huelskamp.... “I would say the surrender caucus is the whiner caucus, and all they do is whine about the battle, as if they thought being elected to Washington was going to be an easy job.” Well, of course, the job's a lot easier when, like Huelskamp, you come from a district that voted for your Presidential candidate by 70%.

Finally, this episode, and the whole phenomenon of being "primaried," point once again to the need to get rid of the institution of party primaries. But that's a tale for another time.

Remarkable Victories in History

A sequel to this, of course.

I

Cruz: It was a ‘remarkable victory’ until Senate Republicans caved on the shutdown

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Wednesday blasted members of his own party after he said that they wasted a “remarkable victory” by making a deal with Democrats to re-open the government and avert a default on U.S. debt by raising the nation’s credit limit....“Months ago, when the effort to defund Obamacare began, official Washington scoffed, they scoffed that the American people would rise up, they scoffed that the House of Representatives would do anything and they scoffed that the Senate would do anything.”

“We saw the House of Representatives take a courageous stand, listening to the American people, that everyone in official Washington just weeks earlier said would never happen,” he continued. “And that was a remarkable victory, to see the House engage in a profile in courage.”

“Unfortunately, the Senate chose not to follow the House...”

  

--The Raw Story

II

....

“With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then,
And new-born baby, died;
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.

“They say it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun;
But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory.
...

“And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win.”
“But what good came of it at last?”
Quoth little Peterkin.
“Why, that I cannot tell,” said he;
“But ‘twas a famous victory.”

--Robert Southey

Epic Battles in History

I

Boehner Urges G.O.P. Unity in ‘Epic Battle’

...But on the matter causing all the Congressional stress, the speaker offered no clue as to how he expected Congress to get out of the dead end it has found itself in, with the government shut for a fourth day and no clear path to raise the federal debt limit to avoid the nation’s first default. “We are locked in an epic battle,” the speaker told his rank and file, those who attended the meeting said, urging them to “hang tough.”

The overarching problem for the man at the center of the budget fight, say allies and opponents, is that he and his leadership team have no real idea how to resolve the fiscal showdown....

  

  The New York Times, October 4, 2013

II

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.

  Tennyson

Frant's Law of Bureaucracy At the Government Shutdown

To understand how government works, you need to know Frant's Law of Bureaucracy, which states:

Problems with bureaucracy are almost never caused by bureaucrats. They're caused by politicians.

Public-sector bureaucracies, as we know, can be inflexible, and sometimes do things that seem irrational and counterproductive. For the most part, this is not because bureaucrats are inflexible or dumb. Nor is it because they lack the bracing effect of a profit motive or competition. No, for the most part bureaucrats do the things they do because that's what legislators have told them to do. They're following the law.

Of course, when following the law has bad results, politicians rarely see much advantage to taking the blame. Much better to be outraged by bureaucratic bungling and leap to the voters' defense. The hypocrisy of this strikes the untutored eye only rarely.

Here,  for example:

Heteronym of the Month

“I think it’s just the idea of, ‘Oh, I’m a sewer,’ that doesn’t thrill the average young individual today,” she said.

  From a New York Times article  on the return of the apparel industry to the US.

Head-Bang of the Month (Con Law Division)

A recent New York Times article talks about a new approach by voting-rights advocates after the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act. It seems that in another recent decision, Justice Scalia affirmed Congress's right to regulate Federal elections under Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, known as the "elections clause." The article goes on to say:

The clause is much less well known than, say, the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and yet Congress’s power under it, Justice Scalia wrote, “is paramount, and may be exercised at any time, and to any extent which [Congress] deems expedient.”

Now "a growing circle of legal scholars" is looking this decision,  which "may point the way to a new approach to protecting voting rights."

Huh? Much less well known? A new approach?

Guys, the Constitution is only a little over 4,000 words long, not counting the amendments. That's 16 double-spaced typed pages. It's the shortest constitution in the world. I am not a Supreme Court justice, nor even a constitutional lawyer, nor even a lawyer, but I knew about this clause, and even cited it in connection with voting rights.

How do we explain this? I suppose that laymen have an incorrect picture of what constitutional lawyers do. We think of them as sitting around reading the Constitution all day. Actually, they are probably sitting around reading Supreme Court decisions, and lower-court decisions, and journal articles about Supreme Court decisions and lower-court decisions. So they probably never think about parts of the Constitution that don't happen to be the subject of court cases.

But still....All I can say is, thank goodness for Justice Scalia. That's the first time I have ever written those words, and probably the last. Granted, he was (the most offensive) part of the majority that created the problem. But without him, who knows how long it could've taken "legal scholars" to come up with this idea?

Attack of the Zombie Philosophers

The New York Times online recently ran a guest column called "What Is Economics Good For?"  It is framed as advice for the incoming chairman of the Federal Reserve from two philosophers of science. Their main advice: Don't think that economics is a science.

When we put a satellite in orbit around Mars, we have the scientific knowledge that guarantees accuracy and precision in the prediction of its orbit. Achieving a comparable level of certainty about the outcomes of an economy is far dicier.

That's because it's a more complicated problem, right? No:

The fact that the discipline of economics hasn't helped us improve our predictive abilities suggests it is still far from being a science, and may never be. Still, the misperceptions persist.... The trouble with economics is that it lacks the most important of science’s characteristics — a record of improvement in predictive range and accuracy. This is what makes economics a subject of special interest among philosophers of science. None of our models of science really fit economics at all.

This is just depressingly superficial. Apparently there's been essentially no progress in philosophy of science since I encountered it thirty-odd years ago. Here is the way a philosopher of science thinks: "Physics is science. Therefore, the more closely something resembles physics, the more scientific it is. Social science is not very much like physics, therefore it's not very scientific."

Might not the problem be, instead, with the philosophers and their "models of science"? It appears the philosophers haven't done much over the last three decades about understanding sciences other than physics, even natural sciences. Science, in their view, is all about prediction. Begone, Charles Darwin, you pseudo-scientist! Where are your predictions? Begone, paleontologists and seismologists! Come back when you've got some predictions. Meteorologists, you're improving, but you'll never be true scientists, because you'll literally never be able to know what the weather will be 30 days from now. You'll never have the accuracy and precision of physics.

The philosophers never say this, of course. They take it for granted that Darwin was a scientist, even though he doesn't fit the model. What the examples above suggest is that not all scientists make predictions; some spend their time understanding and explaining things. I'm reasonably satisfied that we understand earthquakes better than than we did a hundred years ago, even though seismologists have made no progress over that time in predicting them. And similarly for the origin of species.

Nor do I follow what the authors mean by "prediction", or, for that matter, "economics". Apparently what they mean is that economists haven't done very well in forecasting recessions-- not much better, in fact, than seismologists in forecasting earthquakes.

But there's more to economics than that; even just within macroeconomics, some theories have done very well at predicting what would happen after the recession began. And there's more to prediction than forecasting. Any time you formulate a  testable hypothesis, you're making a prediction. Chemistry had one stunning success in forecasting, when Mendeleev's periodic table predicted the characteristics of elements that hadn't been discovered yet. Since then, chemists have continued to do science, without, as far as I know, making forecasts.

Finally, one would expect that philosophers of science would have a reasonable acquaintance with the particular science they're talking about. But here's their advice to the new Fed chairman:

An effective chair ... will be one who understands that economics is not yet a science and may never be. At this point it is a craft, to be executed with wisdom, not algorithms... What made Ben S. Bernanke, the current chairman, successful was his willingness to use methods — like “quantitative easing,” buying bonds to lower long-term interest rates — that demanded a feeling for the economy, one that mere rational-expectations macroeconomics would have denied him.

Paul Krugman calls a foul:

Whoa! They apparently imagine that QE was an intuitive reaction by Bernanke, one that academic macroeconomics would never have suggested. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Philosophy of science, of course, doesn't claim to be scientific. But it does claim to be true. The philosophers need to get to work gathering some evidence for their theories, in places other than the comfortable precincts of physics. Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn wrote about physics; what are you going to write about?

It's Not Just Libertarian! It's Populist! The Latest Republican Attempt at Self-Reinvention

Ross Douthat, one of  The New York Times's two conservative columnists, has another column about "reform conservatism," the struggle of the Republican party to define itself as being for something, at least something that people will vote for. The latest is about one of the next big things, "libertarian populism." 

The basic idea seems to be to adapt the conventional libertarianism exemplified by Ron Paul, giving it more of an anti-insider edge. As libertarians, they can't be against Big Business per se: what would they suggest, regulation? Government intervention to break it up? So they talk about the evils of government collusion with Big Business: special legislation favoring particular industries or firms, by protecting them from competition or outright subsidizing them. 

Douthat links to an exponent of another variety of reform conservatism, there termed "lower-middle [class] conservatism." The author is excited to read an article about libertarian populism:

Here’s the outline, in bullet points:

•        Tough anti-Wall Street reform.
•      “Cut or eliminate the payroll tax.”
•      “End corporate welfare.”
•      “Cleaner tax code.”
•       Less corporatist health care reform.
•      “Kill anticompetitive regulations.”
•      “Address political privilege.”

When I read Tim Carney’s great column, my first thought was: “This is actually 100% compatible with lower-middle conservatism!”

Well, perhaps you see the problem. This is also 100% compatible with liberalism.  Say you'll stop trying to cut food stamps, and I bet any liberal would support a platform like this. This leaves one wondering: So what is the difference, exactly?

It turns out that in several areas there's less here than meets the eye. By "corporatist" health care the author apparently means employer-provided health care: "Health insurers have been protected from competitive forces by the employer-based system .... End the policies that protect the employer-based system, and you begin to introduce competitive forces into the industry." 

I have no idea what he's talking about here. How is the employer-based system protecting insurers from competition? And if you get rid of the employer-based system without adding a purchase mandate, you'll have every American buying individual insurance, or rather not buying, because no one will be able to afford it. Competition is not going to save the day there. Somehow, "Get rid of employer-provided health insurance, and replace it with you're on your own" doesn't strike me as populist political gold. Oh, and by the way, he also wants to means-test Medicare.

But the most problematic part of the proposal is in the section titled "Address political privilege." That turns out to be about ending the "revolving door" between, for example, Congress and lobbyists. OK, fine.... but is that it?

Surely at some point someone will wonder, How does all this collusion between government and Big Business happen? Are businesses innocent virgins ravished by the evil State? Of course not. Everyone knows how a business becomes influential on Capitol Hill-- its executives make political contributions to politicians.

This is the fundamental contradiction, not just in populist libertarianism, but in all libertarianism. You're never going to make much progress on ending collusion between business and government until you get rid of the influence of money on Capitol Hill. That requires either public financing or sharp limits on political contributions. Both of those violate core libertarian principles.

Populist libertarians may be able to gloss over this contradiction for a while, if no one examines their ideas too closely. But faced with a challenge from a real populist, who really wants to get rid of special privileges for business, I think they're in trouble.

Peace Talks and Prisoners

As you've probably heard by now, Israel and the Palestinian Authority have resumed peace talks after Israel agreed to release over one hundred Palestinian prisoners. The prisoner release has caused some controversy. Just over half the cabinet (13 out of 22) voted for it. There were protests that included people who lost relatives to terrorist attacks. "It rips our heart out that they are aiding and abetting the terrorists," said one protester.

Sorry, but I can't share in the outrage. First, of course, there's the Gilad Shalit case of 2011, in which Israel released over one thousand Palestinian prisoners, including people responsible for some truly heinous crimes, in exchange for an abducted Israeli soldier. It would take us too far off topic to go into all the things wrong with that decision, but it was generally supported by Israelis. The difference is that they knew what were getting; one of the ministers who voted "no" said that this time, "there is no certain reward for Israel and its citizens." So, on the one hand, a thousand terrorists in exchange for  a single soldier with certainty; on the other a hundred terrorists in exchange for the possibility of peace. I think that any reasonable estimate of lives saved by peace would show that even if the possibility is small, the second is a better deal.

Second, the normal sentence for ordinary murder in Israel is 20-30 years. All the prisoners were convicted before the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO in 1993, so they've all served at least 20 years.

Third, and most important, there was an easy alternative to the prisoner release: a freeze on the construction of Israeli settlements on the West Bank . That has been the Palestinian demand all along before they would return to peace talks, and it's not hard to see why. Without it, Netanyahu could just string the talks out indefinitely, while the settlements got bigger and bigger. But the Israeli government wouldn't do a settlement freeze. So, no talks, until the U.S. came up with the prisoner-release plan..

Actually, I am a bit surprised that the Palestinians agreed to the deal. It was a brilliant idea by John Kerry (or, more likely, some State Department policy wonk) to come up with this alternative, to give Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a face-saving way of going back to negotiations without getting his key demand. I would presume that he got some kind of guarantee from the U.S. that the talks would not drag on forever.

Do the talks have any chance of success? This episode suggests that the toughest problem will not be, as many think, Jerusalem or the refugees. The political hot potato for any politician of the Israeli right is the settlements, which have strong support from parts of the right's political base. How hot is the potato? Hot enough that Netanyahu would rather release a hundred convicted terrorists than deal with it,

The Single Most Important Fact to Remember About the Food Stamp (SNAP) Program

Average benefit, FY2012: 

$4.39 per day