Steve Reads

Some thoughts that seem true, post-Women’s March edition — January 24, 2017

Some thoughts that seem true, post-Women’s March edition

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  1. Obviously we need to focus. A generalized march against Trump is great, but turning this into results will require some focus.
  2. What you focus on and what I focus on will differ. I care about different things than you do.
  3. I care about expanding and improving health-care access. The Affordable Care Act was a start, but just a start.
  4. We could do better than the ACA, if only from the angle of explaining to people what it does.
  5. “Medicare-for-All” is damn easy to explain.
  6. Current Republican plans for ACA reform involve making it manifestly worse, so that they can make it work worse and then tell us in a few years that government can never do anything right. See Jon Gruber’s excellent comic explaining the ACA and its putative “reform”. (Hat tip to the estimable mrz.)
  7. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect that we’ll get Medicare-for-All in this new, terrible reality. But let’s start the bargaining at the correct end of the spectrum, rather than starting with Republican ‘reforms’ that will destroy Obamacare. Let’s make Obamacare better.
  8. We’re not going to get anything without organization. Without a concentrated lobbying power, the Women’s March will be the new Occupy Wall Street — cute, but ultimately fruitless. I’m looking around to find the right organization to take this fight to Congress. Health Care For All, maybe? I’ll let you know what I find.
  9. In Massachusetts we’re particularly lucky: our Congressional delegation wants the same things we do. Lobbying them will look different than lobbying a Congressperson in a swing state. I’m no expert on how this works. I’m asking around.
  10. Another thing I care about is expanding and securing Social Security. We should be expanding Social Security, not cutting it. Let’s start the bargaining at increasing Social Security benefits and making it available to people 50 and over. Let’s let Republicans tell the elderly why they need to cut the program that the elderly love so much. And if it’s such a good program, why shouldn’t more people get access to it?

Social Security for more people, and Medicare-for-All. That’s a good place to start, isn’t it?

A grotesque mediocrity —

A grotesque mediocrity

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Of the writings dealing with the same subject at approximately the same time as mine, only two deserve notice: Victor Hugo’s Napoleon le Petit and Proudhon’s Coup d’Etat. Victor Hugo confines himself to bitter and witty invective against the responsible producer of the coup d’etat. The event itself appears in his work like a bolt from the blue. He sees in it only the violent act of a single individual. He does not notice that he makes this individual great instead of little by ascribing to him a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history. Proudhon, for his part, seeks to represent the coup d’etat as the result of an antecedent historical development. Inadvertently, however, his historical construction of the coup d’etat becomes a historical apologia for its hero. Thus he falls into the error of our so-called objective historians. I, on the contrary, demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.

Blog-post series idea, quantitative-literacy department: Top Tens — January 23, 2017

Blog-post series idea, quantitative-literacy department: Top Tens

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Here’s a quick idea for a series of blog posts: “If you want to do [x], you will need to address the following 10 items; everything else is negligible.” For instance: if you want to cut the Federal budget appreciably, you’ll need to cut defense, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, or the interest on the federal debt; everything else amounts to very little. (In particular, the National Endowment for the Arts amounts to very little. There may be a list of sound ideological reasons to kill it, but budget-balancing is not at the top of that list.)

Or: if you want to raise American life expectancy, you’ll need to reduce a few major causes of death; giving everyone a flu shot, while useful, won’t cut it.

Or: if you want to reduce health-care costs, you’ll need to focus on the last few years of life; making me pay more for the occasional X-ray won’t cut it.

These are just hypothetical examples, and I’ve not worked out the detailed numbers on any of them; doing so would be part of the fun of the exercise. The goal of the exercise, overall, is to give people — including myself! — a clarifying idea of where the big wins come from. For instance, how much life expectancy could we gain from imposing a $1 tax on cigarettes? (A book I read recently but haven’t yet reviewed probably contains exactly this number.)

Useful idea? What else would people like to see in such a series?

LazyWeb (if that’s still a thing) request: where to read unsanitized Martin Luther King? — January 17, 2017
What should I learn this year? — January 13, 2017

What should I learn this year?

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I feel like I should learn some subject that’s entirely new to me. I basically did that with behavioral economics a few years back, and I found that fun. Now I’d like to find some subject that’s really interesting, totally new to me, and hopefully somewhat off the beaten path. Behavioral economics, for instance, is rather overplayed in the public discourse. Sociology and anthropology, on the other hand, are probably underplayed: among the social sciences, they get the least treatment in mass media, and the least respect among the sort of technical folks who would laud economics. So sociology and anthropology would be good candidates. Maybe I should start with Weber (apart from The Protestant Ethic, which I read and which is a Bad book — a book that is Bad), since he seems to be a father of sociology. And maybe Durkheim?

What about other fields? Anyone have any suggestions on books I really ought to be reading, in subjects about which I know little?

As always, I’d also like to learn more math. I’m much less good at it than I’d like to be. I think writing code may be the right way to learn it, so I think I’ll try to take that avenue in. It’d be interesting to actually code up some crypto and primality-testing algorithms, for instance. I tried to code up the AKS algorithm, but I didn’t really understand why I was coding what I was coding. So a textbook of number theory or crypto, taught via programming examples, would be useful. Likewise for linear algebra and complex analysis. Maybe Coding The Matrix would be the way to go.

Open thread. Let me know what I should stuff into my brain this year!

Prisoner’s dilemma — January 12, 2017

Prisoner’s dilemma

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Suppose someone gave all of America’s media outlets a choice: a sociopath will be at a given place at a given time; if any of you film him, he will destroy the United States, though you’ll get phenomenal ratings; whereas if everyone turns off the cameras, you’ll get slightly less revenue and the U.S. will live another day. I have a fairly good idea how this would turn out.

Anyway, what’s everyone doing on Inauguration Day?

Lately this is how I’m feeling — December 21, 2016

Lately this is how I’m feeling

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The feeling is that our civilization will end at the precise moment that our knowledge and prosperity reaches its pinnacle:

He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

And then Trump was elected.

Possible 2017 project: read only old books —

Possible 2017 project: read only old books

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There’s sort of a novelty/innovation fetish in the world (some other time, I will expand upon my loathing for Bay Area startup culture), so it occurs to me that finding ideas which are

  1. old, and
  2. still considered correct

would be a useful corrective to the structure of today’s world.

Makes me want to start casting about among my academic friends to find books that they think are old but still true.

If nothing else, single payer is easier to explain — December 8, 2016

If nothing else, single payer is easier to explain

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I’m as confused as everyone else by how to perceive my fellow Americans after the recent election, and I’m just as confused as everyone else when I try to understand whether policies even make any difference toward electoral outcomes; Achen and Bartels certainly suggest that policies are much less important in that regard than tribal loyalties. (Review forthcoming, I swear.)

But the tweetstorm below makes a lot of sense to me on why Obamacare might not have swayed many minds. To me it seems much simpler to explain Medicare or — better yet — the VA: you pays your taxes and you gets your services. By contrast, Sarah Kliff of Vox — whose work I adore — appeared on The Gist the other day to explain, among other things, that any forthcoming GOP replacement for Obamacare might contain a continuous-coverage requirement: insurers can raise rates on you if you’ve gone without coverage for some length of time. This is similar to the individual mandate, in that it’s trying to discourage people from getting coverage only when they think they’re going to need it. But honestly: what fraction of Americans could explain the mandate; what fraction would be able to explain the continuous-coverage requirement; and what percentage of Americans could explain the adverse-selection logic underlying any of these policies? Instead, as the fellow below notes: they just know that their coverage sucks, and that it can be nightmarishly difficult to obtain it. The continuous-coverage requirement, if that’s what we get, is just going to make insurance even more annoying. I can do no better at presenting the socialist alternative than Corey Robin’s piece, which I need to reread every year or so. “Pay taxes; get services” is a hell of a lot easier than what Obamacare gave us. And I say this as someone who was effectively a single-issue voter in 2012; I would have voted for whichever candidate ensured the continued survival of Obamacare. And now it looks likely that it’ll die soon.

I’m not nearly hopeful enough, at this moment, to believe that our current crisis will somehow, underpants-gnomes style, lead to single-payertopia in a few years. At the moment, in fact, I assign probability less than 1 to their being another election again in American history. And, just in case it needs to be said: I’m also not slagging on anyone for failing to pass single payer back in 2009; lots of people I trust have written that this was just not in the cards. So I don’t know the future, and I’m confident that the past is the best we could have gotten. It even seemed, for a time, that the thin edge of the single-payer wedge might be by way of Obamacare waivers (akin to the existing Medicaid waivers) in Vermont, just as I understand that Canadian single payer got started in Saskatchewan. That didn’t work out, either.

So I don’t know how the world will look, and on most days I’m not even confident that I understand half of America. But single payer is probably worth a shot, for electoral reasons alone.

Hat tip to Cass Sunstein — October 27, 2016

Hat tip to Cass Sunstein

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Sunstein’s book Republic.com came out in 2001, and it anticipated a lot of the “filter bubble” concerns that people mention today — e.g., Vox’s piece on “How social media creates angry, poorly informed partisans”. Sunstein’s book is well worth a read. You can buy it used for a penny plus shipping.

The main thing I took away from Sunstein was the idea of a “general-interest intermediary”: a media source like the New York Times that forces you to read things outside of your bubble. He followed that idea in the direction of government regulation, which I took to be something like the fairness doctrine. It’s not the best idea, but I wouldn’t really hold that against Sunstein: the final chapter of most any nonfiction work is the “what do we do about this?” chapter, and it’s almost always dissatisfying. Sunstein deserves credit for identifying the phenomenon well before anyone else; his book was a response to Nicholas Negroponte’s “Daily Me” boosterism.

Have others read The Filter Bubble? I have not, but it sounds like it covers a lot of Sunstein’s terrain. Can anyone comment on what it adds to Republic.com?