New Travelers Insurance Commercial

Travelers always comes out with funny, clean commericals. This is a great example of one. Great little tune as well.

Country profiling for immigrants is a GREAT idea

In this article in MacLean's, Charlie Gillis worries that Canada is engaging in too much "country profiling" in its immigration policy - letting in Asians at the expense of Caribbeans and Latin Americans. This gives me an opportunity to stand up for country profiling in immigration, which I think is a great and underappreciated idea.

My reasoning for country profiling has little to do with the likelihood that some immigrant groups are more likely to succeed than others. I think if we want immigrants who are likely to succeed - which we do - we should simply bias our immigration policy toward admitting lots of highly skilled people, regardless of their country of origin (another thing Canada does, I might point out). This will have the effect of boosting our economy while lowering inequality.

Country profiling, on the other hand, is useful for purely political reasons.

Reason 1: Country profiling can help solve America's long-standing race problems. Admitting - soliciting! - lots of talented, motivated Africans is, I believe, our best bet for healing the seemingly indelible rift between white and black Americans. African immigrants, who come here willingly, do not possess the cultural memory of slavery, and thus lack the tendency to see whites as a historical oppressor. This is good; holding ethnic groups accountable for their ancestors' (or their ancestors' look-a-likes') sins is counterproductive, but it's a very difficult habit to kick. African immigrants' positive attitudes will (hopefully) slowly diffuse throughout the American black community. Additionally, high-skilled African immigrants in large numbers will help erase the achievement gap between blacks and whites (as an anecdotal example of this observe that our president is the son of an African immigrant).

So, high-skilled Africans should be our top priority for immigration.

Reason 2: Country profiling can ease Americans' fears over Mexican immigration. Mexican immigration is unpopular in America, despite these immigrants' low crime rate, rapid English adoption, and high rates of intermarriage. My guess is that this fear is less about race, and more about the simple size of the Mexican ethnic bloc. When immigrants are a polyglot, there is little danger - real or imagined - of one ethnic group replacing the dominant culture with its own language and institutions. But when a plurality of an area's population hails from a single country of origin - as Germans did in parts of the Midwest long long ago - there is naturally a feeling of unease among the native-born. Will the new super-bloc declare Spanish to be its natural language? Will they want to secede and return the Southwest to Mexico? These fears, routinely expressed in conservative circles, may be unfounded, but they represent American culture's instinctive desire to be a polyglot, patchwork nation.

Biasing immigration away from Spanish-speaking countries and toward other language groups can ease these fears and increase immigration's overall popularity.

Reason 3: Country profiling can help cement our overseas alliances. Immigration creates a two-way exchange of people, ideas, and capital between the source country and the host country. With the geopolitical situation turning decisively against American hegemony, our best bet for continuing to protect our country's interests lies in strong alliances, especially in Asia. Large numbers of immigrants from India, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, etc. will deepen business, cultural, and political ties between the U.S. and those nations, helping us build a coalition of Asian states wary of China's rise. Immigration from China, additionally, can help provide a refuge and a platform for dissident voices in that authoritarian country. And immigration from Brazil can cement our ties with that large and growing democracy.

So, in sum: if we're smart, we'll use country profiling. Done right, it can restore immigration's popularity, ameliorate America's racial divisions, and improve our international relations.

Open the gates!!

Ohio Booster Seat Law

Back in October the Ohio lawmakers put into law a requirement for children to be in vehicle booster seats until a child is 8 years old or 4 feet, 9 inches tall. The prior law was if a child was 4 or under and weighted less than 40 lbs they had to be in a federal approved car seat. After that, they were free to sit in a car with out any aid.

This new law that was past also had a grace period that lasted until this past April but now that the grace period is over tickets are starting to be handed out along with a fine. Fines can range from $25 to $75 per incident. One thing to note, this citation is a secondary offense which means you can’t be pulled over just for violating the booster seat law. You would first have to be pulled over for some other violation.

The reason for this change is that seatbelts, if a child is not in a booster seat, can cause serous injury to children less than 8 years old or smaller than 4 feet, 9 inches. The booster seat helps to place the seatbelt in a safer position on the child.

Behavioral political economy

Superhero economist Paul Krug-man, and his favorite sidekick J. Bradford, are hopping mad over the turn toward fiscal austerity in European (and, potentially, American) policy circles. Krugman has written blog post supporting more stimulus spending here, here, here, here, here, and here, as well as full-length columns here, here, and here, and DeLong has made arguments here, here, and here.

As they themselves lament, however, almost no one is listening. Why not? The models Krugman and DeLong are using are unambiguously better than anything stimulus opponents can come up with. And the apparent success of stimulus policies in America and China are hard to ignore. Why, then, is everyone other than America's leading economist, from politicians to Fed officials to pundits, suddenly a deficit hawk? Are they, as Krugman claims, falling victim to the idea that fiscal austerity and lengthy periods of low growth are morally virtuous?

I doubt it. My guess is that the fear of increased deficits is mostly due to other less ridiculous psychological factors. Specifically, these three:

1. Policymakers don't trust economists. And with good reason; economic models are usually pretty bad at forecasting the economy, and pretty ambiguous when evaluating the effect of a past policy choice. When Krugman gives a laundry list of countries that boosted their economies even while cutting deficits, and then gives a different reason why each example doesn't apply today, people who don't understand - or who don't believe - the underlying assumptions tend to increase their skepticism as each new wrinkle is introduced. Given economists' lousy track record, of course we're skeptical when even a famous and brilliant economist tells us to do something counterintuitive.

2. Many policymakers are risk-averse. Most economists are fine picking their most plausible model, cranking out the results, and drifting off to sleep assured that their policy recommendations are as correct as they could have possibly been. Fed officials, whose decisions directly affect the lives of millions (and their own jobs), naturally tend to be quite a bit more cautious, risk-averse, and (small-c) conservative when selecting from among the enormous constellation of economic models. They tend to judge those models based not on what the models say is the most likely outcome - which experience shows us rarely happens - but what they say is the worst-case scenario (if only the Fed controlled carbon emissions, right?).

The worst-case scenario of Krugman's model is that fiscal austerity leads to a decade of high unemployment. That's bad, but the worst-case scenario of any model in which stimulus doesn't work is that fiscal expansion leads to sovereign default. And sovereign default is very bad for a country. Like, 1990s Argentina bad. When Paul Krugman claims that debt markets are not worried about current U.S. levels of debt, cautious policymakers remember that markets were not worried about the housing bubble either - until it burst.

And, finally:

3. Policymakers have different priorities than economists. Stimulus spending almost certainly involves some degree of tradeoff between the present and the future. Stimulus is justified by the idea that reducing unemployment over the next few years is worth the drag on future growth caused by debt. But that is dependent on a value judgment, namely, Keynes' idea that "in the long run, we're all dead." Some policymakers, especially independent technocrats like central bankers, may not feel that being dead in 10 years is a good plan. Though many elected politicians seem willing to spend their countries into the ground (! Republicans! !), central bankers could easily take a longer view, and decide that the cost of piling up, say, an additional 100% of GDP of debt is not worth putting 5% more of the country to work over the next decade.

Now, policymakers may be wrong to instinctively mistrust Krugman's models. They may be overly cautious. And they may be caring about the future too much and the present too little. But these failings are far more forgivable, and far more understandable, than simply having moral values that insist that economic pain is good.

And who knows - maybe in this case the crowd is right, and the experts are wrong, and more stimulus spending really would be a boondoggle. I myself think that stimulus would work, and that it would be worth the cost. But I'm not willing to say that with 100% confidence. And Krugman and DeLong, if they are scientists first and policy advisers second, could stand to show a little more of the doubt that is the foundation of science itself.

A quick, clean intellectual shower in the cold, pure waters of discredited bullshit

Albert Einstein claimed that "God does not play dice" with the interactions of subatomic particles. Actually, as it turned out, He does. So there's plenty of precedent for very smart people to believe stubbornly in very silly ideas, even in direct contradiction of all evidence. Thus, maybe we shouldn't be too hard on Ed Glaeser, who is really a very brilliant economist, but who remains wedded to an outmoded and discredited intellectual religion:

It is both the best and worst of times for libertarians. On the plus side, real, live politicians who might conceivably get elected call themselves libertarians. On the negative side, true libertarians have lost their ancient luxury of being able to avoid any responsibility for the gaffes and errors of political leaders.

Libertarianism rests on two bedrock beliefs: human freedom is a great good and the public sector tends to screw things up. The first belief is based more on faith than empirical result; the second derives from millennia of human experience. The increased appeal of libertarianism today reflects a nonpartisan view that the public sector has been deeply problematic under either party. It is a backlash against President Bush as well as President Obama. (Ron Paul was, after all, the only Republican to vote against the 2002 Iraq war resolution). Libertarians tend to think that the Bush years taught that all governments were flawed, not that everything would be better with a new leader who would expand the public sector.

Showing a remarkable sense of timing, my colleague Jeffrey Miron has just published an excellent primer on libertarian thought: “Libertarianism, From A-Z,” an engaging arrangement of brief essays illustrating one libertarian’s view on everything from abortion to zoos. Professor Miron’s libertarian mix of love of liberty and skepticism toward the state leads to his view that “radical reductions in government make sense for any plausible assessment of the effect of most policies.”...

I always find it refreshing to take a quick, clean intellectual shower in the cold, pure waters of libertarian thought...

The problem with dogmatic thinking, of course, is that it always falls victim to teleology; when you decide your conclusions first and then go looking for evidence in support of them, you'll see what you want to see. Thus, Glaeser looks at the Bush administration and sees proof not that good government is necessary and important, but that government itself is inherently inefficient. As Mark Thoma notes, this is more than a bit ridiculous:

Bush made his ideological belief about government self-fulfilling -- he stacked the deck in their favor (e.g. hiring incompetent people to head agencies like FEMA, filling regulatory agencies with people opposed to regulation, etc., etc.). Drawing general conclusions from an outcome that was forced by design, as libertarians have apparently done with Bush, does confirm preexisting biases, but it doesn't tell you much beyond that.

The lesson of the Bush administration is not that "all governments were flawed." We learned about an extreme, i.e. how bad things can be when a president sabotages government agencies by appointing cronies -- people who provided important political support -- to head important agencies rather than qualified, competent administrators...

The Bush administration was deeply flawed, no doubt about that, and it was partly (though not entirely) by design. But there is no general lesson here about all governments, only the particulars of an administration that did it's very best to validate libertarian beliefs about government.

In a word, yes.

More generally, though, Glaeser seems to be straining at the intellectual confines of his chosen dogma. He points out the problem posed to libertarianism by events like the BP oil spill. He proposes using the court system - one of the few government institutions that libertarians generally accept - to put things right, but is dissatisfied with this solution.

But he does not yet see the rot at the heart of libertarianism. Its two bedrock beliefs - that "human freedom is a great good and the public sector tends to screw things up" - are deeply flawed. The moral belief is ill-defined and the empirical belief is factually false.

"Human freedom is a great good." Sounds good to me! But which human freedom? The freedom to murder? The freedom to dump pollution on your neighbor's land? The freedom to scream profanity in public? The fact is, different freedoms tend to be mutually exclusive; what we end up doing is choosing those freedoms we think lead to a better society - free speech, freedom from violence - and exalting those above the others, so that those "freedoms" become "good" by definition, while the opposing freedoms - the freedom not to hear ideas you disagree with, the freedom to punch annoying people in the head - get ignored and swept under the rug. Libertarians, sadly, rarely if ever acknowledge this. They merely pretend that all the murky, confusing cases - for example, smoking bans, or pollution regulations - don't exist, or else they go with their gut and pretend they're following a high moral principle.

As for the idea that "the public sector tends to screw things up," it's just not right. There is strong evidence that the public sector has done a GREAT job with roads, research, national defense, clean air regulations, and other public goods. And there is the nagging fact that every single rich country on the planet spends over a third of its GDP through the government. Libertarians, following the teleological imperative of their assumed conclusions, simply pick the examples of government failure - the Soviet Union's ham-handed economic planning, or the dysfunctionality of European labor markets - and claim that these constitute all the available evidence.

So both pillars of libertarian thought are made of Jell-O. But this does not stop libertarians from believing in them, and only gives pause to the very smartest among them (like Glaeser). Ideologies are attractive because they are "quick," "clean," "cold," and "pure." But those are just synonyms for "easy," "comforting," "rigid," and "simplistic."

National Flood Program Expired... Again

On May 31st Congress allowed the national flood program to expire once again. As of today, June 10, 2010, there has been no renewal of the flood insurance program. This is a key issue especially since a number of areas in Ohio are being resurveyed and rezoned on the national flood insurance map. Homes that were once in Zone C or X which mean they are not in a 100 year flood zone are now being classified as a Zone A or other Zone which puts them in a 100 year flood zone.

What is the significant of this? Well, if you own a home in the rezoned area that is now in a 100 year flood zone and your home has a mortgage on it, you will be required by the bank or other lending institution to purchase flood insurance. A lot of times this can be a costly policy.

What happens if you don’t buy a flood policy? The mortgage company will purchase it for you and then bill you. Unfortunately there is no way around it as long as you have a mortgage on the property.

The ironic thing about this whole situation is that right now, as of the day this blog entry was written, you can not purchase flood insurance. Flood insurance is purchased through the national flood program (FEMA) and as mentioned above the program is temporarily expired. We will be sure to keep you posted on our blog as to when the program might be back up and running. In the mean time if you have received notice from your bank that you are now in a flood zone and must purchase flood insurance feel free to get in touch with your friendly Fey Insurance Representative.

Hamas is OK, You're OK

When I was seven, my dad taught me about the Viet Cong. Although they were very brutal, he said - torture, murdering civilians, terrorism, and all that - they were defending their homeland, and so they couldn't be called "bad guys." He likened the Viet Cong to the Ewoks - plucky low-tech tribalists who weren't afraid to eat a little human flesh, but who in no way deserved to have their forest stomped on by the death machines of the Galactic Empire (it's interesting that, when he made this analogy, my dad had no idea that this had in fact been George Lucas' intent).

I suppose this is what made me a defender of Hamas from an early age. I have dim recollections of arguments during my early teenage years, when someone would say to me "Hamas kills innocent people, so anyone in Hamas is evil," and me replying "No, they're just fighting a war and trying to get a country for themselves." I certainly never approved of Hamas' methods; blowing up schoolbuses is hardly sporting, and nonviolent resistance is the best of all possible strategies for national liberation. And neither did I approve of Hamas' goal of destroying Israel. But I had - and have - a hard time blanketly condemning a group of stateless people fighting for a country of their own.

So it's no surprise that I think this column by Shmuel Rosner is totally wrongheaded, and is in fact exemplary of the totally wrongheaded approach taken by Israel toward the Gaza strip since the withdrawal of 2005. Rosner writes:

Since 2007, the policy of the International Quartet has been to isolate the government that controls Gaza after Hamas forces ousted the forces loyal to the official representative of Palestinians from the Strip in a coup. An ugly and violent coup...

So, there were very good reasons for isolating Hamas and attempting to contain the Gaza Strip. True, the government in charge of Gaza is a headache for Israel. But it is no less of a nuisance to the legitimate representative of the Palestinians—the Palestinian Authority, headed by Mahmoud Abbas. Those who want to strengthen the parties of peace have a choice to make: Recognizing Hamas would signal that the Palestinian Authority could no longer claim to represent the people of Gaza. It would signal that the world is willing to work with a bully, with a group refusing to commit—even rhetorically—to the cause of peace, that it has given up on a better life for the Palestinians of Gaza.

The premises of this argument are that 1) Israel and the international community should act to weaken Hamas vis-a-vis Fatah (the Palestinian Authority) in Gaza, and 2) it is possible to actually do so.

The second of these is obviously wrong. Hamas has triumphed in Gaza - decisively, permanently. It is no longer possible for anyone to bring Fatah back to power there; the key piece of evidence in support of this fact is that Fatah itself is making no effort whatsoever to reestablish control over Gaza. Therefore, there is no alternative to Hamas in the strip. Any successful weakening of Hamas would necessarily leave chaos in its wake, which would lead directly to the rise of even more radical groups like Islamic Jihad.

The first premise - that it is a good idea to weaken Hamas via external pressure - goes against the Westphalian system of national sovereignty. Unless Israel claims Gaza as part of the Israeli nation - which the 2005 withdrawal makes it clear it does not - then Israel has absolutely no right to decide who rules in Gaza. Some have argued for counter-Westphalian interventions on humanitarian grounds, but even those who allow such exceptions must admit that Hamas is not brutalizing the people in the territory under its control.

Thus, the appropriate response to both the withdrawal of 2005 and Hamas' civil war triumph in 2007 is for Israel and the international community to recognize Gaza as an independent state, and to treat Hamas as the legitimate government in Gaza. This is the Westphalian solution, and it is the correct one, for several reasons.

First of all, if Hamas is recognized as a legitimate government, then it has something to lose, because it knows that if peace were established it would be guaranteed continued power. This will make Hamas more willing to recognize Israel sometime in the future, just as the Palestinian Authority (and Israel itself!) abandoned their terrorist roots once they found themselves ruling some territory.

Second of all, recognizing Gaza as an independent nation-state would immeasurably improve Israel's moral standing in the international community, because anti-Hamas actions would then become anti-Gaza actions - a simple war between opposing nation-states, rather than Israel's brutalization of its own non-citizen subjects. If Gazan independence is recognized, and if Israel then retaliates with force for Hamas rocket attacks, then it is simply a case of Country A attempting to destroy Country B, and Country B defending itself with force. The same goes for the Israeli blockade; after all, Britain's historic use of naval blockades against its hostile neighbors was key to its survival for hundreds of years.

But in order to legitimize its attacks on and blockades of Gaza, Israel must make it clear that if Hamas recognizes Israel and stops attacking Israel, then Israel will leave Gaza alone, end its own attacks, and end the blockade. If Israel demands peace, recognition, and respect from Gaza, it must be willing to provide exactly the same thing in return, and to regard Hamas - or any Gazan group that subsequently wrests power from Hamas! - as the political entity with the right to make such a deal.

In other words, "being willing to work with a bully" is what makes the world go 'round. Nation-states almost always begin as brutal gangs, but with recognition and respect, they become quite benign entities. If you don't believe me, examine the history of the UK, with its successive waves of bloody conquest, or America, with its ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans, or Turkey, which began as a foreign army from Central Asia. What pacifies nation-states is not irredentist rejection of once-terrorist governments, but the Westphalian system of national sovereignty and the inviolability of national borders. The Hamas-rejectionists' refusal to recognize Hamas is as idiotic as refusing to recognize the UK because the Normans terrorized the Saxons.

Rosner concludes:

The people who come on ships, who confront the Israeli blockade, who supposedly believe in a better life for the people of Gaza—a better life that they deserve—are signaling to Hamas that with a little more patience, their first goal will be achieved: Hamas' rule in Gaza will be legitimized and Hamas' government will receive aid, material support, visits from world dignitaries, and invitations to attend summits and gatherings.

Yes. And that goal should be not only Hamas', but Israel's and the international community's as well.