Tag: Kevin Drum

Killing Baby Hitler

When Kevin Drum and Jeb Bush agree about something, one of two grossly implausible events must have occurred: either Kevin is wrong or Jeb is right. Since Jeb’s wrong-headedness is more reliable than even Kevin’s good sense, a devout Bayesian in this situation will start out suspecting that Kevin has made one of his rare mistakes.

Some time ago – sorry, real life has been interfering with my blogging – the New York Times asked what seemed like a remarkably silly question: “If you could go back and kill Hitler as a baby, would you do it?”

Answers: 42% Yes, 30% No, 28% Not sure.

The Huffington Post picked this up and asked it of JEB! by email. Bush (sensibly) ducked it until he was asked on camera, at which point he emitted a characteristically inarticulate grunt of affirmation. “Hell yeah, I would! You gotta step up, man.”

Kevin was more thoughtful but equally decisive:  “I’m not an especially bloodthirsty guy, but hell yes, I’d do it. Sure, maybe World War II would happen anyway, though that’s hardly inevitable. Maybe the Holocaust too. But even a reasonable chance of stopping either one of them would be well worth the life of a baby who would otherwise grow up to be a monster. What am I missing here? I wouldn’t even hesitate.”

I’m pleased to report another success for the Rev. Mr. Bayes. In my judgment (which I would be glad to pronounce ex cathedra if someone would just build me a cathedral) both Bush and Drum are obviously and catastrophically wrong.

Forget about time-travel paradoxes, forget about the risk that something even worse would happen, and assume that your powers of foresight are perfect. You still shouldn’t kill Baby Hitler, for the simple reason that the Baby Hitler you’d be killing wouldn’t have done anything wrong, and intentionally killing innocent people is wrong, the same way torture and slavery are wrong. End of discussion.

Logically, of course, the Right-to-Life crowd should be up in arms about Bush’s expressed willing to intentionally take innocent life. And logically, of course, Bush himself couldn’t really hold his expressed position on abortion and also his expressed opinion about baby-killing. But, of course, logic has nothing to do with it.

Continue reading “Killing Baby Hitler”

The Eurozone’s Inbuilt Compassion Deficit

The Euro is the Windows 8 of the economic policy design world: In both cases, it’s very hard to understand how putatively smart people worked so hard to create a product so ill-suited to the needs of those who were supposed to rely on it.

That’s yours truly writing at Mother Jones about another way that the designers of the Euro seemed not to understand basic principles of human psychology (not that they grappled honestly with basic economic principles either). I have written before about other psychological failures of the system, in this case I am referring to the false assumption that all Europeans have a strong shared sense of identity which would generate compassion rather than screw turning in hard economic times.

You can read the whole piece here. Far more important than my Euro-ramblings is this: For the next two months that learned knight of the blogosphere, Kevin Drum, will go through the final phase of his cancer treatment. While he is recovering, a passel of bloggers who admire him will be filling in at Mother Jones, so you can keep watching his column with an expectation of blogging activity and I hope also an occasional update on how Kevin is coming along. My best wishes to Kevin and his wife (and also of course, their cats).

“Pre-existing condition” gets personal: the case of Kevin Drum

Go ahead, libertarians and conservatives: tell me why what ACA repeal would do to Kevin Drum is OK with you.

Kevin Drum explains what would happen to him if ACA were repealed: due to his cancer, he’d be uninsurable. If his current employer folded - not a remote eventuality, in the world of magazine and online journalism - he’d be s.o.l.

Kevin, let us recall, is neither poor nor reckless. He didn’t choose to get cancer. He did choose to have health insurance. Nothing he could have done - short of working for a government or TBTF private outfit - could have protected him from the risk he will face if a Republican is elected President in 2016 and does what he will have promised to do in order to become the Republican nominee.

So, here’s a challenge to my conservative and libertarian readers:  Tell me, if you can, why that would be OK with you.

I promise to publish any literate and coherent reply verbatim, or link to any post elsewhere that answers the challenge.

Update A reader points me to this Megan McArdle post from 2012, which explains in detail how a little-known provision of HIPPA (a law that long pre-existed ACA) would protect someone in the position Kevin would be in should Mother Jones fold. Anyone who has continuously maintained health insurance is, apparently, eligible to buy new insurance without underwriting. That’s not much help to people who, when they lose their jobs, don’t have enough in the bank to keep paying for unsubsidized health insurance. But that’s not Kevin’s situation. Unless some health care wonk tells me otherwise, I’ll count my challenge as having been fully met, and will have to fall back on the other 69,000 reasons Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican.

Second update Harold Pollack says there are more twists and turns. Yes, HIPPA protects someone who has been continuously insured, and who can afford to pay for health insurance without an employer subsidy after he’s lost his job. That would include Kevin. But what that person is protected against is only explicit discrimination in premium or coverage based on his pre-existing condition.  He’s still at the mercy of the individual-insurance market, whose products are often designed with “adverse selection” in mind: since some  healthy people who are unemployed or self-employed or employed without health benefits will decide to go uncovered rather than pay the full cost of health insurance, the individual-insurance market will have a higher share of sick people, and insurers tend to tailor their individual plans accordingly.

In the absence of ACA, insurers could and did exercise many non-underwriting strategies to avoid high-cost individuals or to impose high out-of-pocket costs on these individuals. Some of the most obvious issues included stringent annual and lifetime caps on dollar coverage now abolished under ACA. There were also limitations on benefits now included in ACA’s essential health benefit structure. HIPAA left untouched many aspects of coverage important to cancer patients and others with costly conditions. 

As I noted here, groups such as the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society had good reason to rank among the leading supporters of universal coverage.
So while HIPPA did protect a rather narrow group of relatively well-off people against the specific suckage of “underwriting” based on pre-existing conditions, they were still fully exposed to the general suckage of the individual health insurance market.
So, with that amendment to the question, this column is still open to any ACA opponent who wants to explain why we should be willing to subject ourselves to that sort of risk.

 

 

 

Lead and crime, continued

Lead causes crime. How much of the great crime wave and the great crime decline were lead-driven is unclear.

Yesterday I returned to banging the (Kevin) drum about the pernicious effects of environmental lead. Both a note from a reader and comments elsewhere about Kevin’s latest post suggest that an earlier post of mine had created confusion.

Here’s the note:

Mark, in your latest post, you seem to be believing the lead hypothesis for violent crime again. But here I thought you said that Phil Cook changed your mind. Are there new data that tipped you back, or is there a hole in Cook’s argument?

There are two different claims here:

  1. Lead causes crime, and the effect size is large.
  2. Decreasing lead exposure was the primary cause of the crime decline that started in 1994.

#1 is certainly true, and nothing Cook has written or said contradicts it. We have both statistical evidence at the individual level and a biological understanding of the brain functions disrupted by lead.

Cook convinced me that #2 is not true, or at least is not the whole story, because the decline happened in all cohorts while lead exposure deceased only for the younger cohorts. You can still tell plausible stories about how the young’uns drove the homicide wave of the late 1980s/early 1990s and that less violent subsequent cohorts of young’uns reduced the overall level of violence, but that’s not as simple a story. In a world of many interlinked causes and both positive and negative feedbacks, the statement “X% of the change in A was caused by a change in B” has no straightforward empirical sense.

So I’m absolutely convinced that lead is criminogenic, in addition to doing all sorts of other personal and social harm, and strongly suspect that further reductions in lead exposure (concentrating on lead in interior paint and lead in soil where children play) would yield benefits in excess of their costs, even though those costs might be in the billions of dollars per year. What’s less clear is how much of the crime increase starting in the early 1960s and the crime decrease starting in the early 1990s (and the rises and falls of crime in the rest of the developed world) should be attributed to changes in lead exposure.

The original point of yesterday’s post stands: When you hear people complaining about environmental regulation, what they’re demanding is that businesses should be allowed to poison children and other living things. No matter how often they’re wrong about that - lead, pesticides, smog, sulphur oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, estrongenic chemicals - they keep on pretending that the next identified environmental problem - global warming, for example - is just a made-up issue, and that dealing with it will tank the economy. Of course health and safety regulation can be, and is, taken to excess. But the balance-of-harms calculation isn’t really hard to do. And the demand for “corporate free speech” is simply a way of giving the perpetrators of environmental crimes a nearly invincible political advantage over the victims.

Lead, evil, and corporate free speech

The Supreme Court’s “corporate free speech” doctrine guarantees that the next time an industry wants to poison the country, as the petroleum industry did with leaded gasoline, it will have the political muscle to do so with impunity

Kevin Drum, who’s been doing Pulitzer-quality science and policy reporting on the behavioral effects of environmental lead, has yet another item today, once again reporting a new paper by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes of Amherst, who’s been doing the fancy number-crunching on the topic. No real surprise: in addition to greatly increasing rates of criminal behavior, lead exposure also increase the risk of other consequences of poor self-command, such as early pregnancy. Kevin draws one of the right morals of the story: that biology matters, while liberals and conservatives tend to unite in blaming everything on society, economics, and culture:

It’s a funny thing. For years conservatives bemoaned the problem of risky and violent behavior among children and teens of the post-60s era, mostly blaming it on the breakdown of the family and a general decline in discipline. Liberals tended to take this less seriously, and in any case mostly blamed it on societal problems. In the end, though, it turned out that conservatives were right. It wasn’t just a bunch of oldsters complaining about the kids these days. Crime was up, drug use was up, and teen pregnancy was up. It was a genuine phenomenon and a genuine problem.

But liberals were right that it wasn’t related to the disintegration of the family or lower rates of churchgoing or any of that. After all, families didn’t suddenly start getting back together in the 90s and churchgoing didn’t suddenly rise. But teenage crime, drug use, and pregnancy rates all went down. And down. And down. Most likely, there was a real problem, but it was a problem no one had a clue about. We were poisoning our children with a well-known neurotoxin, and this toxin lowered their IQs, made them into fidgety kids, wrecked their educations, and then turned them into juvenile delinquents, teen mothers, and violent criminals. When we got rid of the toxin, all of these problems magically started to decline. This doesn’t mean that lead was 100 percent of the problem. There probably were other things going on too, and we can continue to argue about them. But the volume of the argument really ought to be lowered a lot. Maybe poverty makes a difference, maybe single parenting makes a difference, and maybe evolving societal attitudes toward child-rearing make a difference. But they probably don’t make nearly as much difference as we all thought. In the end, we’ve learned a valuable lesson: don’t poison your kids. That makes more difference than all the other stuff put together.

But there’s another moral to be drawn.  The toxicity of lead has been known for at least a century. The introduction of tetraethyl lead into gasoline in the 1920s sparked a controversy, which the automobile industry, the petroleum industry, and Ethyl Corporation (a GM/Esso joint venture) won, using the usual mix of dirty tricks including lying and threatening scientists with lawsuits. A similar battle was fought over lead paint in the 197os, with the lead-paint vendors in the bad-guy role, and over lead emissions from smelters, with the American Iron and Steel institute trying to destroy Herb Needleman’s scientific career.
Then, mostly by the accident that leaded pain fouled catalytic converters, the battle was rejoined over lead in gasoline, with the old pro-toxin coalition fighting a drawn-out rearguard action to delay regulation as much as possible.
As far as I know, not a single executive, lobbyist, or scientist working for any of the companies that were making money by poisoning children and causing a crime wave spoke out in favor of public health and safety. Why should they? After all, they were just doing their jobs and paying their mortgages, and Milton Friedman had proclaimed that the only social responsibility of business was to make money (and that anyone who believed otherwise was a closet socialist): a morally insane proposition still widely repeated.
All of which makes me think of C.S. Lewis’s preface to The Screwtape Letters, explaining his image of Hell as the realm of the Organization Man:
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in … sordid “dens of crime.” … It is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

The plutocrat majority on the Supreme Court has ruled that, whatever the facts, as a matter of law using money to influence the outcome of elections does not constitute “corruption,” because “there is no such thing as too much speech.”  Soon it will probably rule that the companies can cut the comedy and make contributions directly from corporate coffers to campaign accounts, but by now the rules are so leaky that it hardly matters anymore. As a result, quiet men (and women) in pleasant offices, who have not only neatly-trimmed fingernails but utterly clear consciences - men and women most of whom would be psychologically incapable of injuring a child with their own hands - will continue to poison other people’s children (with environmental toxins, unhealthy foods, alcohol, tobacco, and, shortly, cannabis), call anyone who tries to interfere a socialist, and use everything short of explicit bribery to get their way.

And that, my friends, is what’s at stake this year, and in 2016, and - unless we’re very lucky - in every election for the rest of my lifetime.

The Incarceration Tipping Point

The three-decade-plus growth of incarceration in the U.S. at one point seemed an unstoppable public policy juggernaut, insensitive to political and economic changes. Until it wasn’t: The number of people in prison finally began dropping under President Obama and appears likely to continue doing so.

One key determinant of the size of the prison population is the number of admissions each year. I have presented a longer series of data on the prison admission rate before; here I will just focus on the past decade of data to better highlight something unusual about recent history. In interpreting the data, note that the government defines admissions as sentences exceeding one year, so every admission represents a unique individual.

Incarceration Tipping Point

The shape of the curve is singular. Initially the rate continues its decades-long ascent. But in 2006 it hits an invisible ceiling and begins plummeting with increasing speed. This is an unusual finding in public policy analysis. Particularly at the national level, it usually takes awhile for major policy changes to be consolidated. But in this case, we have experienced an unambiguous U-turn. Further, while the 2007 and 2008 drops in the rate of prison admission are roughly equal in size, from that point forward the drop each year exceeds that of the prior year. The drop in 2012 was about double that of 2010, four times that of 2009 and six times that of 2008.

I could tell a story about the causes of this policy turnabout and I am sure many other people could also (get the lead out, Kevin…). But all I want to do here is highlight the striking nature of the change: Outside of tulip bulb investing and the like, you rarely see national policy go so vigorously in one direction and then abruptly travel with accelerating speed in the opposite direction.

p.s. Some people have cited my prior posts on the prison admission rate change as “Humphreys’ research”, so let me clarify that I do not deserve credit for doing anything groundbreaking here. I am simply taking two numbers produced annually by your federal government (the number of prison admissions and the size of the general population) and dividing one by the other. In the chart above I multiplied the result by 100,000 as this is the standard incarceration rate used by criminologists.

Lead and crime: a hole in the theory

Lead exposure is criminogenic at the individual level. It’s tempting to attribute the big increase in crime after 1960 and the big decrease after 1994 to getting the lead out of gasoline. But it turns out those changes were period effects, not cohort effects.

Kevin Drum, whose “Criminal Element” essay linking violence rates to lead exposure has been (as it deserves to be) extraordinarily influential, links to a BBC story in which a more-than-usually-dim criminologist explains that he disbelieves in the lead-crime link because all biological explanations of crime are outside “the mainstream” (presumably meaning “the mainstream of criminological research”). Kevin is right to say that the multiple levels of evidence for the lead-crime link (brain-imaging work, case-control studies at the individual level, studies of crime changes in neighborhoods that suffered greater and lesser increases in lead exposure after WWII and decreases in lead exposure after the mid-1970s, and cross-national studies) deserve more than a casual blow-off. It’s not, after all, as if “mainstream” criminology had a bunch of well-worked out causal theories with proven predictive power.

Like Kevin, I’ve been frustated that the evidence about lead hasn’t led to more action, if only some serious experimental work removing lead from randomly selected buildings or neighborhoods and then doing developmental measurements on the childen in the chosen areas compared to children in control areas. And I was puzzled when I heard that the hyper-sensible Phil Cook of Duke was among the skeptics.

Alas, Phil seems to have good reason to raise questions, especially about the ultra-strong claims sometimes heard about the percentage of the crime drop since 1994 attributable to changes in lead exposure. (Note that in a system with multiple positive feedbacks, the change-attribution factors needn’t sum to unity, so the claim that “the change in X accounts for 90% of the change in Y” is dubious on its face.)

Cook writes:

My skepticism about the “lead removal” explanation for the crime drop stems from the same source as my skepticism about the Donohue-Levitt explanation in terms of abortion legalization. They have an exact parallel to the previous explanations for the surge in violence of the late ’80s by John DiIulio and others. The focus in both cases is the character of the kids: the belief that during the 80s the teens were getting worse and during the ’90s they were getting better.  Even a fairly casual glance at the data demonstrates that whatever the cause of the crime surge, and then the crime drop, it was not associated with particular cohorts. It was an environmental effect 10 cohorts were swept up in the crime surge simultaneously, and the drop has the same correlated pattern.

There is a natural inclination to assume that the reason the murder rate is increasing is because there are more murderers, and the reason we have fewer is that there are fewer murderers. It’s not that I rule out such explanations - I’m open to the idea of lead removal and abortion legalization - it’s just that I don’t think it explains the actual pattern of the youth violence epidemic, either up or down. More generally, my instinct is to look to the social and economic environment to explain large shifts in population outcomes.

Here’s Cook’s paper with John Laub.

Now, since youth violence surely has impacts on adult violence, finding that all the cohorts decreased their violence at the same time doesn’t quite rule out the idea that the younger cohorts were largely driving the train. And those brain-imaging, case-control, neighborhood, and cross-national results are still out there. But Cook’s objection remains a powerful one: the theory predicts that we should have seen the crime declines specifically in the birth cohorts exposed to less lead, and that’s not what we saw in fact.

I’d still like to see some experimental work to figure out how much additional lead removal would turn out to be cost-justified (with crime-reduction benefits a significant, but but not the dominant, part of the benefit story), but the simple story “Crime declined because lead declined” now has a major hole in it. That’s too bad, because attempts to find the relevant social and economic causes haven’t gotten very far. To my mind, the crime boom that started in the late 1950s or early 1960s and the crime bust that started in the mid- 1990s (and other large-scale, decades-long swings up and down in crime rates elsewhere) remain largely unexplained in retrospect, as they were entirely unpredicted in prospect.

Footnote And that, of course, is the difference between science and policy analysis on the one hand and mere advocacy on the other. Of course scientists and analysts are influenced by their values and prejudices. I don’t pretend that Jessica Reyes’s work didn’t make me happy or that Cook’s response doesn’t make me sad. The lead-crime story fits all my political prejudices, as well as my taste for simple and surprising explanations with clear policy implications. And I’ve been a loud advocate for it. But I don’t want to believe it if it isn’t true.

I Wasn’t There, But Let Me Tell You Exactly What Happened

In response to my lament regarding how some people think watching movies makes them an expert in a public policy area, Kevin Drum points out a broader problem with how people judge what they do and don’t know:

Everyone with the manual dexterity to hoist a beer can regale you with confident answers to all the ills of society, while in the very next breath insisting that you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to subject X. That’s a lot more complicated than you think.

Subject X, of course, is something they happen to know a lot about, probably because they work in the field. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that they’ve learned to be cautious about the one field they know the most about doesn’t stop them from assuming that every other field is pretty simple and tractable.

It would be absurd to deny this sad phenomenon. Kevin is describing how possession of deep knowledge in some areas doesn’t generalize into an assumption that there is also relevant deep knowledge in areas in which we are not specialists. During some of the hottest cultural debates of recent years, I have been thinking about this same lack of generalization from the other direction: Why don’t we assume we are ignorant in unfamiliar areas when we have the experience of ignorance in familiar ones? I am thinking in particular of our quotidian experience of misunderstanding or misremembering our interactions with other people. Continue reading “I Wasn’t There, But Let Me Tell You Exactly What Happened”

Tolerance for Snooping Among Elites and Masses

Is anyone really upset about government snooping?

Kevin Drum argues that President Obama’s views on the government’s right to snoop have a long provenance:

[Obama] falls squarely into the mainstream of the elite, bipartisan, Beltway consensus on this stuff. He always has, just like every president before him. This isn’t the fourth term of the George Bush presidency, as so many people like to put it, but more like the 16th term of the Eisenhower presidency.

Yet while calling tolerance of snooping an elite viewpoint, he is not sure the hoi polloi are much different:

Will the public finally rebel after learning about the latest way their government is keeping tabs on them? I doubt it. As near as I can tell, most of the public is willing to sell their innermost secrets for a free iTunes coupon.

Getting the (remaining) lead out

A high-return investment in smarter people and lower crime.

Shorter Kevin Drum:

1. Lead is remarkably nasty stuff. In minuscule quantities (measured in the single digits of micrograms per decliter of blood) it damages both IQ and the capacity for self-command.

2. The rise of lead exposure from gasoline, and its subsequent decline, accounts for a large share of the crime boom of 1960-90 and the crime decline that started in 1994.

3. Children are still being exposed to lead from two major sources: residual lead in soil, and lead paint in homes, especially window-frames.

4. Substantially eliminating those sources of exposure would require a one-time expenditure of about $400 billion. (That sounds like a lot of money, until you look at Treasury bond rates and translate it to $12 billion a year.)

5. The return on that investment would be at least in the high tens of billions of dollars per year.

Kevin’s piece, the cover story in the current Mother Jones, is a model of science/policy journalism. He carefully chases down both the biology and the social science supporting the claims about the effects of lead, identifies the main remaining sources, and documents the abatement processes, with cost estimates. (The quantification of benefits is mostly hand-waving; neither the outcome predictions nor the valuations are convincing. But it’s more than adequate to show that the benefit-cost analysis would come out hugely positive.)

It remains to be seen whether a crime-control and educational initiative that doesn’t fit the intellectual categories or feed the budgets of the criminal-justice and educational systems can obtain any political purchase. The answer so far seems to be no.