Subscribe via RSS Feed

Author Page for Paul Campos

rss feed

Now that Obama is president there’s no more racism

[ 0 ] May 5, 2009 | Paul Campos

OK that would be an unfair characterization of this Richard Cohen column.

Slightly unfair:

We should never confuse unfair with illegal. Still it would be nice if every once in a while they coincided. That is especially the case in matters such as this because the justification for affirmative action gets weaker and weaker. Maybe once it was possible to argue that some innocent people had to suffer in the name of progress, but a glance at the White House strongly suggests that things have changed. For most Americans, race has become supremely irrelevant. Everyone knows this. Every poll shows this. Maybe the Supreme Court will recognize this.

Good grief. (h/t Yglesias).

The price of moral panic

[ 0 ] May 5, 2009 | Paul Campos

Certain candid obesity researchers will tell you in private, especially if you get a couple of G&Ts into them, that yeah, there really isn’t any increased mortality risk associated with BMI at all until you get into the mid-30s, but still it would be good for people to avoid getting fat because, um, well you know they could get really fat if they “let themselves go,” and what about “quality of life,” and well anyway people want to be thin, so what harm does it do to exaggerate a little (sic)?

Actually, a lot.

The Supreme Court and diversity

[ 0 ] May 3, 2009 | Paul Campos

One of the many interesting things about Obama is that he took such an unusual career path once he left Harvard. I don’t know how many other presidents of the Harvard Law Review haven’t either clerked, or joined or an elite firm, or become tenure-track law professors , or taken a big deal job in the federal legal bureacracy, but my guess would be zero.

Anyway, we’ll see if that maverick streak is on display when he picks Souter’s replacement.

Torture is an impermissable evil, except when it’s, like, really important to find something out

[ 0 ] May 2, 2009 | Paul Campos

That’s the practical gist of this Charles Krauthammer column, which begins by invoking the much-mocked “ticking time bomb” scenario, but quickly moves on to this gem:

The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great.

This is the kind of “exception” which illustrates perfectly why the abstract philosophy seminar question of whether there’s any circumstances in which it might be morally permissable to torture is both much harder to answer and much less practically useful than the real question, which is, should we institutionalize torture? Because as soon as you institutionalize the practice, you’ll end up generating rules like this one, which through the impeccable logic of bureaucratic rationalization are certain to turn every case into an exceptional one.

Every use of torture that is anything other than the purest sadism always proceeds on the assumption that the tortured is a high value enemy in possession of information likely to save lives. Indeed, if the interrogation is failing to demonstrate this it can only be because the subject hasn’t cracked yet. Otherwise, the people doing the torturing are nothing but sadists, and since they know that’s not the case . . .

The spookiest aspect of this column is that Krauthammer is a psychiatrist. Does it not occur to him that every torture regime rationalizes its actions through precisely the sort of exceptions he advocates? Pure sociopaths, after all, are supposedly rare– although reading the sort of pro-torture porn that’s become a respectable part of political debate in this country does make one wonder.

Paying for health care and "healthy choices"

[ 0 ] May 2, 2009 | Paul Campos

Matt Yglesias points out he doesn’t really think that raising sin taxes will reduce health care costs. And he doesn’t make that argument in the post in which I attributed it to him, although he does link approvingly to people who do.

As Matt Weiner notes in the comments to my post, I over-interpreted what Yglesias was saying — he was arguing that “sin taxes” are a desirable way to raise revenue to pay for health care, and may well improve public health in the bargain. I’m more skeptical than he is about the latter point, for reasons I reference in my original post.

But my real concern is an argument that shows up all over the comments to Matt’s post, and, somewhat more significantly, is implicit in such pronouncements as Obama’s preposterous claim during the presidential campaign that rolling back obesity rates to 1980 levels would save Medicare a trillion dollars.

That argument is that people get sick because of lifestyle choices, which means that being sick is your own fault, which in turn means that “forcing” me to pay for your health care means I’m being forced to subsidize your bad lifestyle. This argument isn’t completely false, but it wildly exaggerates the extent to which “bad” lifestyle choices are responsible for health care costs. (As I pointed out in the context of cigarette smoking, it’s not even clear that a healthy lifestyle produces a net health care savings to society in comparison to a less healthy one). And it’s fueling such dubious innovations as quasi-mandatory “wellness programs” for employees

In other words, the really invidious effect of this argument is that it provides yet another handy excuse for not socializing the cost of health care, since needing health care at all, in the most extreme version, becomes a “choice.” And it’s disturbing how many people buy into some version of that claim.

The New Puritans

[ 0 ] April 30, 2009 | Paul Campos

This Yglesias post reflects a group of beliefs regarding public health that tend to cut across ideological lines, probably because they resonate with some deeply embedded cultural puritanism that affects both the right and the left in America.

To simplify somewhat (but not much), the argument is roughly that health care costs so much because people get sick, and people get sick because they have bad habits. So the key to cutting health care costs is to get people to behave better.

Right-wingers tend to frame this argument in terms of “individual responsibility,” while lefties are more prone to blame structural factors, but in both cases the solution to the problem is the same: get Americans to stop stuffing their fat lazy faces with “junk food,” soda, alcohol, and cigarettes, so we can get health care costs under control.

This argument is wrong-headed on a whole bunch of levels. In particular it assumes that people get sick primarily because of their lifestyle habits, when in point of fact people get sick mainly because they get old. And old peoples’ health care costs a lot. But an even bigger problem is the assumption that improving peoples’ health means their health care will end up costing less.

Indeed, consider the one item on this agenda that would actually improve public health: decreasing smoking rates. It’s far from clear that decreasing cigarette smoking would actually save health care costs. It may well be that the improved health quitting smoking produces decreases costs in the short run, but increases them in the long run, because non-smokers live so much longer.

As for the other stuff, it’s been 90 years since Prohibition and the spiritual descendants of Carrie Nation are very much with us. When a smart guy like Yglesias simply assumes that alcohol consumption is a net negative to society it’s easier to understand how this nation’s insane drug policies remain so difficult to reform. It should be unnecessary to point out that alcohol seems to have a markedly beneficial effect on the health, even narrowly defined, of moderate drinkers. This doesn’t even take into account that drinking produces enormous amounts of pleasure, which of course is why the puritans hate it so much. Surely that should count for something. Drinking also generates considerable social costs, but to assume without argument that America would be a better place if people drank less is completely unwarranted.

As for soda and “junk food,” Barry Glassner’s The Gospel of Food is a nice introduction to the moralistic hysteria surrounding these subjects. In any case the notion we can cut health care costs significantly by getting people to drink less soda and eat fewer Doritos is unsupported by any evidence.

The bottom line is that health care costs have risen so much in large part because health has improved so drastically in America. 100 years ago life expectancy was 50, most diseases were basically untreatable, and health care costs were really low. Getting everybody to stop smoking, give up the demon rum, and eat like Alice Waters isn’t going to return us to that utopia.

Maybe it really will be the Al Franken decade

[ 0 ] April 28, 2009 | Paul Campos

Hard left now filibuster-proof.

…[update by Rob] in an article filed last night, Alexander Bolton argued that Specter was moving right and cutting into Toomey’s base. FAIL!

Two concepts of torture

[ 0 ] April 27, 2009 | Paul Campos

More than 50 years ago John Rawls wrote a famous essay in which he defended utilitarian theories of punishment from the charge they justified punishing innocent people under certain circumstances. The idea is that if the central function of punishment is to deter crime (as opposed to a retributive view in which its function is to give people what they deserve) then there are circumstances, at least in theory, in which this primary deterrence function would be served by framing an innocent person. Rawls’ reply was that while it was easy to construct hypothetical scenarios in which this would be true, it was much harder and probably impossible to construct an institution of punishment as a social practice that would allow for punishing the innocent, and yet would still be desirable from a utilitarian perspective.

The analogy to torture should be obvious. Unless you’re a strict deontologist, it’s fairly easy to construct Jack Bauer hypotheticals in which in theory it might be desirable to torture someone. (For instance, would you waterboard George Steinbrenner to save one million children? )

What’s much harder is to imagine a real-world set of institutions and social practices which could somehow limit torture to these very rare circumstances while still producing enough benefits to justify its use. In other words, there’s all the difference in the world between discussions of torture in the abstract, and actually creating a bureacratic machine that wouldn’t, for example, end up waterboarding a mentally ill low-level terrorist 83 times in return for no useful information.

Etiquette in the Age of Google

[ 0 ] April 27, 2009 | Paul Campos

Two recent social interactions:

(1) Friend at work sends me email asking for some advice regarding refinancing. I reply with some thoughts but add that she should talk to a real expert, a guy I use for this stuff. I give her his name and the name of his company. She emails back with thanks, and asks if I could send along the contact info for my guy.

(2) I send an email around to the faculty about how we’re planning to give Roy Romer an award at graduation and if anybody has questions (i.e., objections) let me know. Colleague who grew up in another country and emigrated to the U.S. a few years ago emails, asking who Roy Romer is.

This is a minor thing in a time of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” trillion-dollar bailouts, Madonna falling off a horse etc., and I like both these people, but come on folks! You are emailing me from a computer. Which is attached to the interwebs. Comprende? (BTW both my interlocutors are under 40 if that matters).

Submitted for your consideration

[ 0 ] April 26, 2009 | Paul Campos

Attending the NFL draft in the jersey of your favorite team to cheer and boo your team’s selections is the lamest thing a sports fan can do.

Mark the Bird Fidrych

[ 0 ] April 13, 2009 | Paul Campos

It’s been a bad day for baseball, with the death this morning of legendary Phillies announcer Harry Kalas, and now the sudden passing of Mark Fidyrch. Fidyrch, who was only 54, was killed in an accident on his farm. I was 16 and a fanatic Tigers fan during the Bird’s brief flight across the national landscape. The Tigers were coming off the worst season in their history, and Fidyrch’s combination of brilliant pitching (158 adjusted ERA, not that we knew what that was back then) and totally unselfconscious antics — he talked to the ball before every pitch and had about 50 twitchy mannerisms that were all somehow endearing — remains one of my favorite baseball memories.

The Bird’s career was wrecked after just 35 starts by an undiagnosed torn rotator cuff, and a hard-headed analysis of his stats indicates he probably wasn’t destined for a Hall of Fame career — he only had 97 strikeouts in 250 innings in that magical rookie year. Still for a few months he was on top of the world, and somehow neither that experience nor his sudden fall seemed to have any affect on his personality, which appeared to remain immune to the contaminating power of fame.

Hail to thee blithe Spirit
Bird thou always wert . . .

More on judicial review and democracy

[ 0 ] April 8, 2009 | Paul Campos

The court’s decision can be defended, in theory, on various grounds.

(1) The state’s constitution actually required the court to rule as it did.

I’m not going to debate this claim any more than I’m going to debate a Scientologist about whether we’re all really Thetans.

(2) The ruling is a “plausible” interpretation of the state’s equal protection clause and associated precedent. This is true. To say it’s plausible is to say it’s the kind of argument you can make in court, and judges might buy it. Note the claim upheld by the court would have been utterly implausible just a few (10? 20?) years ago, even though in the interim there’s been no change in the relevant formal legal materials. So what has changed? Obviously, the beliefs of judges. Just as obviously, this change in judicial opinion is a product of the change in the political landscape in regard to gay marriage.

All of which is to say that judges are now more likely to find a constitutional right to gay marriage than they were a generation ago (when the odds of them “finding” such a right could be calculated as zero) for exactly the same reason that legislators are now more likely to vote for civil union and gay marriage laws than they were a generation ago — because an idea that was politically unpopular has become more popular.

(3) It hasn’t become popular enough in Iowa., however, to be enacted through legislation. The defense of judicial review of this sort by people who aren’t sufficiently clueless to believe that what’s going on is the deduction of formally entailed legal conclusions from authoritative texts comes down to some combination of “it’s not really that anti-democratic for courts to do stuff like this because they need support from the political branches,” and/or “this is too important to be left to the normal political process.” I just want to note that these arguments tend to become somewhere between deeply implausible and utterly outrageous to those who make them whenever courts employ this type of judicial review to invalidate laws they like.

Now it’s certainly possible to defend aggressive judicial review under the guise of interpreting very general constitutional language. But two arguments that seem quite wrong to me are that such a practice is “legal interpretation” in any useful sense of that phrase, and that such a practice isn’t significantly less democratic than the typical legislative process (which of course itself is only very imperfectly democratic).

Page 61 of 75« First...102030596061626370...Last »

    • Switch to our mobile site