When “the other perspective” is crowded with morons, there’s no reason to offer them a platform

Wonderful.

“The HPV vaccine is considered a life-saving cancer preventer, but is it a potentially deadly dose for girls?” This was the promo for Wednesday’s episode of Katie, Katie Couric’s daytime talk show on ABC. Couric, whose husband passed away from colon cancer, is known for being a relatively responsible journalist when it comes to health care issues, so despite this needlessly alarmist advertising, I held out hope that her show would demonstrate that no matter how adamant a very small group of people are that their health problems are caused by the HPV vaccine, there is no evidence that the HPV vaccine is dangerous. Sadly, my hopes were dashed as Couric spent a half-hour of her show drumming up fears that the vaccine will make you very ill or even kill you.

For at least the ten thousandth time, it’s worth pointing out that “debating” the science on vaccine safety and efficacy is about as fruitful or necessary as debating the veracity of the moon landing. Perhaps next week, Couric will host a thoughtful discussion on children’s dental care. Yes, she encouraged her own children to brush their teeth several times a day, but some people have concerns that deserve a balanced hearing. Most young people who die unexpectedly, for example, have brushed their teeth with fluoride toothpaste [insert "precious bodily fluids" joke here] sometime in the previous 24 hours. That ominous correlation deserves a closer look. Indeed, perhaps other correlations will emerge when we do. There’s no way to know for sure. We’re simply asking questions.

See also Phil Plait and Seth Mnookin, who was evidently considered as a guest on the show before the producers realized they weren’t very good at their jobs.

Oddest Christmas tradition?

I might have you trumped.

On Snark and Smarm

Tom Scocca’s defense of snark as a justified response to smarm is, you know, brilliant, necessary, stuff like that there. A teaser:

Over the past year or two, on the way to writing this essay, I’ve accumulated dozens of emails and IM conversations from friends and colleagues. They send links to articles, essays, Tumblr posts, online comments, tweets—the shared attitude transcending any platform or format or subject matter.

What is this defining feature of our times? What is snark reacting to?

It is reacting to smarm.

What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t everyone just be nicer?

And, crucially, in response to David Eggers’s silly proposition that you can’t criticize any work of art before you’ve created one of the same kind yourself:

Here we have the major themes or attitudes of smarm: the scolding, the gestures at inclusiveness, the appeal to virtue and maturity. Eggers used to be a critic, but he has grown out of childish things. Eggers has done the work—the book publishing, the Hollywood deal-making—that makes his opinions (unlike those of his audience) earned and valid opinions.

It is no accident that he is addressing undergraduates here; he tells the Advocate that before he sent back his reply to its questions, he had already delivered a version of the text as a speech at Yale. He is explicitly performing, for an audience of his inferiors. (“The rant is directed to myself, age 20, as much as it is to you, so remember that if you ever want to take much offense.”)

It is also no accident that Eggers is full of shit. He is so passionate, and his passion has such rhetorical momentum, that it is almost possible to overlook the fact that the literal proposition he’s putting forward, in the name of large-heartedness and honesty, is bogus and insulting. Do not dismiss … a movie? Unless you have made one? Any movie? The Internship? The Lone Ranger? Kirk Cameron’s Unstoppable? Movie criticism, Eggers is saying, should be reserved for those wise and discerning souls who have access to a few tens of millions of dollars of entertainment-industry capital. One or two hundred million, if you wish to have an opinion about the works of Michael Bay.

As Pauline Kael used to say, you don’t need to be able to lay eggs to know that an omelet tastes good. That a movement based on that obvious logical fallacy has become more and more influential would be remarkable if a lot of people didn’t stand to make money from critics acting as publicists instead.  Anyway, really, read the whole etc.

The Power of the Purse and Prison Reform

I have some thoughts on a new report on policy proposals to address the American scandal of mass incarceration.

What the world needs now is another good lawyer

Excellent post from Dybbuk at OTLSS on a new “initiative” from the Law School Admissions Council –the agency that administers the LSAT — designed to entice high school students and first and second year undergraduates “particularly but not exclusively those from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds” into eventually enrolling in law school, via images suggesting that they’ll be able to save dolphins, fight environmental racism etc.

I have thoughtlessly compared the law school scammers to Bernie Madoff, but these images make me realize how unfair that is to nebbishy old Uncle Ponzi, rotting away in federal prison. Madoff scammed the wealthy, and he scammed institutional investors who should have known better. The law school racketeers operate from a lower circle of depravity, luring social justice-oriented kids into life-destroying debt by promising to provide the foundation for a career that will allow those kids to fulfill their highest ideals.

I know that this blog mostly involves preaching to the converted. However, I hope readers will explain to youth of their acquaintance, who may be vulnerable to this kind of law school marketing approach, that public sector and public interest jobs are few in number, especially now that public sector austerity has taken on cast of permanence. Moreover, the structure of student debt forgiveness programs has made these jobs, which were once practically consolation prizes, highly desirable and competitive on purely economic grounds. And that means, in all likelihood, that a law grad will not have the opportunity to use the law to effect social change, represent indigents, or save the dolphins, unless he or she is willing to do so pro bono. . .

The images below all bear the slogan: “Actually, the world DOES need another lawyer.” Maybe so, but the world DOES NOT need another scammer.

Naturally legal academics are outraged by comparisons to Madoff et. al., despite the striking practical similarities between Madoff’s activities and initiatives such as LSAC’s newest propaganda campaign. That outrage is a consequence of their genuinely sincere belief in their own probity. And that belief is a prime example of the power of ideology:

Very frequently such views systematically distort social reality in much the same way that an individual may neurotically deny, deform or reinterpret aspects of his life that are inconvenient to him . . . In such analyses the ideas by which men explain their actions are unmasked as self-deception, sales talk, the kind of “sincerity” that David Riesman has aptly described as the state of mind of a man who habitually believes his own propaganda. In this way, we can speak of “ideology” when we analyze the belief of many American physicians that standards of health will decline if the fee-for-service method of payment is abolished, or the conviction of many undertakers that inexpensive funerals show lack of affection for the departed, or the definition of their activity by quizmasters on television as “education.” The self-image of the insurance salesman as a fatherly adviser to young families, of the burlesque stripper as an artist, of the propagandist as a communications expert, of the hangman as a public servant — all these notion are not only individual assuagements of guilt or status anxiety, but constitute the official self-interpretations of entire social groups, obligatory for their members on pain of excommunication.

Peter Berger (1963)

Determinants of student debt

The Project on Student Debt has just released a study, indicating that 71% of 2012 graduates of non-profit colleges and universities graduated with student debt, and that on average these students borrowed $29,400 over the course of their college attendance (This figure does not include accrued interest on debt. It is also an underestimate, since the methodology the study employed could not account for all private loans. Approximately 20% of the reported debt was in the form of private loans, although with the 2010 changes in higher ed financing this figure is probably declining going forward).

The Project’s web page allows you to look up debt totals for individual schools, and it enables the following striking comparison:

Colorado College

Average amount borrowed of 2012 graduates with debt: $19,970

Percentage of graduates with debt: 32%

Average amount borrowed of all 2012 graduates: $6,390

Current total nominal cost of attendance: $208,000

University of Colorado Law School

Average amount borrowed of 2012 graduates with debt: $100,813

Percentage of graduates with debt: 86%

Average amount borrowed of all 2012 graduates: $86,699

Current total nominal cost of attendance: $156,000

What accounts for such remarkable disparities? Possible explanations:

(1) Differences in socio-economic status of families of graduates. My semi-educated guess is that this is a factor, but a relatively minor one. While the student body at CC, like that at all elite liberal arts colleges, is dominated by people from rich and upper middle class families — with the emphasis on upper — this seems to be increasingly the case at CU Law, from my impressionistic sense of the marked change in the demographics of students over the past 20 years (during which time resident tuition went from $4,000 to $31,500 per year). In sum the average CC student probably comes from a wealthier background than the average CU Law student, but not drastically so.

(2) Differences in levels of financial aid. This is probably a big factor. The CU Law class of 2012 got about $4,000 per year, on average, knocked off the nominal price of attendance. I don’t know what the comparable number is for CC, but I would imagine it is much higher. (The respective endowments of the two schools in 2012 were $47 million and $573 million).

(3) Differences in the willingness — as opposed to the ability — of families to contribute to the cost of student attendance. I suspect this is by far the most salient factor. It seems to now be the cultural norm among the lower upper class/upper middle class in America that it’s expected families will pay for all or most of the cost of undergraduate degrees, but will contribute little or nothing to financing the cost of graduate and professional school. (A common arrangement seems to be that families will contribute toward the cost of living while their children are in the latter institutions, but will require students to pay for — or more accurately borrow from the federal government — all of the cost of tuition).

That certainly seems to be the case at CU Law, given that it appears the average undergraduate debt of our students is somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000, with the median being zero. (This figure is of course relevant to interpreting (1) above).

This cultural norm is probably a product of, among other things, a semi-conscious assumption that the point of a college education is to provide one’s children with the benefits of general edification, i.e., the classic liberal arts ideal, while at the same time engaging in a powerful form of social signaling (It’s further assumed that this social signaling can to some extent be monetized). Meanwhile the function of graduate and professional education is to produce an enhancement in future earning potential that has a positive net present value in straightforward pecuniary terms, when measured against the cost of attendance.

To say these assumptions are becoming problematic would be something of an understatement.

The Overdetermined Shape of Health Care Reform

Johnathan Bernstein has an addition to my recent series of posts on health care reform:

One key point that Lemieux doesn’t mention this time: in one sense, this really isn’t about 2009 at all. It’s about 2007 and 2008, when the three leading Democratic presidential candidates converged on essentially the same plan (with Obama famously omitting the individual mandate). That says a lot. It says that none of those three candidates believed that adopting single-payer would have given them a serious edge in a closely contested nomination fight — and that no other candidate was able to leap to the top tier by embracing single-payer. In other words, it tells us that in the world of 2007-2008, at least, the ACA was mainstream within the actual Democratic Party as it was, and single-payer was a fringe position in the actual Democratic Party as it was. Maybe lots and lots of Democrats preferred single-payer in some sense, but virtually none of them, either elites or electorates, did anything about it. And that’s what counts.

What this also means is that ACA vs. single-payer had virtually nothing to do with Barack Obama himself. And so Obama-centric explanations for it are clearly, 100%, wrong.

This is right. Presidents have agency, but they lead political coalitions. In a political universe where single payer (or, more plausibly, Swiss health care) was viable, at a minimum it would have to have such powerful support among the Democratic electorate that a major presidential candidate would endorse it. This wouldn’t be enough — given its structure, the median votes in the Senate are almost certain to be well to the right of the Democratic candidate for president, let alone the Democratic primary electorate — but it would be a minimum first step. In the politics of 2008 and 2009, anybody who became a Democratic president was going to pursue comprehensive health care reform of essentially similar shape unless they decided not to pursue it all (which was highly unlikely.) It’s worth noting that the comprehensive health care reform undertaken by a major state with a much more liberal electorate and collection of legislators took a simialr form as well.

And while nobody can prove the counterfactual, I also agree that President Clinton would have signed something virtually identical to the ACA. It’s true that in a context in which every single one of the maximum number of votes in the Senate available in a very narrow window was necessary, there’s far more risk of a catastrophic downside (health care reform fails outright or settles for token tinkering, either ruining health care reform for at least another generation and squandering a rare historical opportunity) than of a marginal upside (it’s highly unlikely that everything Obama did was optimal, but nobody has articulated a scenario in which every single conservative Democratic senator votes for a singificantly more progressive bill). But nobody learned the lesson of failure of the Clinton administration’s health care reform more vividly than Hillary Clinton; she was if anything even less likely to going try the “develop a plan and shove it right down Congress’s throat with the ram of the BULLY PULPIT!” strategy beloved by people who have no idea what they’re talking about again. And moreover, she had in the interim actually served more than one term in the Senate; she certainly wasn’t going to listen to asinine amateur-hour advice about how she should sit down with Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman and tell them to cut the bullshit. It’s overwhelmingly likely that something virtually identical to the ACA would have passed with Clinton in the White House. With Edwards, it’s trickier, but he was never going to be the Democratic nominee for a variety of reasons.

Finally, the fact that Obama’s pandering on the mandate was abandoned when it was time for actual presidenting also further reveals the stupidity of the “but the ACA and Romneycare the plan passed by massive supermajorities of Masschusetts Democrats over Mitt Romney’s many vetoes were just a slightly varnished Republican Heritage Foundation plan” line of argument. The only important thing that the Heritage Foundation’s never-serious plan to force every non-healthy adult to pay for unregulated catastrophic insurance while destroying Medicare and Medicaid has in common with the ACA and MA health care reform is the mandate. But the mandate is just an obvious requirement of any program that has guaranteed issue — that is, any serious health care reform that doesn’t perform the politically impossible task of eliminating the American insurance industry. Barring a level of subsidies that wasn’t forthcoming from Congress, guaranteed issue can’t work without a mandate — the alternatives, like Paul Starr’s proposal that adults who forgo insurance sign contracts to refuse emergency care health care benefits* for a given time period, were both politically impossible and, in my view, substantially worse on the merits than the mandate. The free rider problem is not, in fact, some unique insight on the part of Heritage Foundation hacks. Any comprehensive health care reform was going to take the shape of guaranteed issue with mandate, and other than that the ACA and the Heritage Foundation plan couldn’t be more different.

*UPDATE: As a commenter notes, Starr’s proposal would not have applied to emergency care, but only to any benefits of the law (including, presumably, COBRA or Medicaid.) I’ve corrected to reflect my error. I stand by my criticism of the plan as both politically unworkable and inferior to the mandate; refusing access to the market for people who lose employer-based coverage would be still be horrible, and if it didn’t apply to emergency care it would also deal much less effectively with the free rider problem. See also Cohn’s contemporaneous response.