The end of Arrested?

It doesn't look like our Bluths are going to be saved this time around.

Heartbreaking.

-Mr. Alec

Cheney on the road

What a Rock and Roll lifestyle he leads.

My favorite part? The TV must be tuned to FOXNews (but to his credit he also asks for a NY Times), but still.

-Mr. Alec

Cool population maps and other econ stuff

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has some awesome population-weighted maps. They are really cool.

Also, I am taking a class from this guy John List this quarter on Experimental Economics. It looks like it is going to be awesome (he started the class off by doing an experiment), in honor of how giddy I have been since that class, here is what Tyler Cowen had to say about List earlier this month:

Uri Gneezy and John List write:

Recent discoveries in behavioral economics have led scholars to question the underpinnings of neoclassical economics. We use insights gained from one of the most influential lines of behavioral research -- gift exchange -- in an attempt to maximize worker effort in two quite distinct tasks: data entry for a university library and door-to-door fundraising for a research center. In support of the received literature, our field evidence suggests that worker effort in the first few hours on the job is considerably higher in the "gift" treatment than in the "non-gift treatment." After the initial few hours, however, no difference in outcomes is observed, and overall the gift treatment yielded inferior aggregate outcomes for the employer: with the same budget we would have logged more data for our library and raised more money for our research center by using the market-clearing wage rather than by trying to induce greater effort with a gift of higher wages.

In other words, people in the real world show behavior much like that of traditional economic agents. Here is the paper. Have I mentioned that John List is one of the most important young economists? He has jumped from a U. Wyoming Ph.d. to a U. Maryland job to the notoriously-stingy-to-tenure Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. If you want to see a tough skeptic about many commonly accepted research results, especially in the realm of economic experiments, read some of John's other papers. John is developing more finely grained methods of discovering when we should believe laboratory experiments. Are you surprised he puts greater trust in market data?

So cool...

-Mr. Alec

Organ Donation

Many complain about the devastating shortage of organs in this country (like me). It is not like there is a shortage of easy policy solutions to this problem (like an opt-out system instead of an opt-in system).

But while nothing ever seems to come of that easy solution, an even more interesting approach to doing something about the shortage has been done. It is a voluntary non-profit which, if you sign up for, you agree to donate your organs to members of the non-profit. In return, you get first dibs on the organs from members of the non-profit (all of these donations are only done post-mortem; you don’t agree to give up your heart even though you are alive and well).

"Directed donation" is possible by a provision in the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act which PrawfsBlawg does a much better job discussing then I ever could.

But regardless of its legality, LifeSharers (the non-profit) is a really interesting concept that incentives the type of action that people should be making anyways (like signing the back of their fucking driver's license).

Gotta love those incentives.

-Mr. Alec

No! Not more time on reading and math!

Why is the New York Times reporting on this like it is bad? Here is the scoop:

Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.

Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.

The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.

The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math...

Honestly, what good is history, science, or art without reading and math skills. The student is going to be hard pressed to learn anything in any of those subjects if they can't read the notes on the board, the textbook at home, or the questions on an exam. On top of that, compared to mathematics, who honestly cares about music?

I think this is a fantastic trend, god forbid we graduate literate students who can do basic math.

-Mr. Alec

Additional thoughts on questioning American support of Israel

A couple of points to add about my extremely lengthy bit on American treatment of Israel:

1. The argument I was trying to make:

I was trying to argue that the authors of the paper, Mearsheimer and Walt, were not so much trying to be perfectly rigorous social scientists as trying to advance an important issue of debate on a very peculiar issue. I think if you look at their paper from that perspective they are successful.

Now Dan Drezner linked to a quote of Mearsheimer's that points to this not being his intention. It seems that if the goal of the paper was to drum up a debate, Mearsheimer and Walt are failing at advancing that debate in the main stream media:

Mearsheimer and Walt also seem to be resisting further publicity.

"I don't have an agenda in the sense of viewing myself as proselytizing or trying to sell this," Mearsheimer told the Forward. "I am a scholar, not an activist, and I am reticent to take questions from the media because I do believe that this is a subject that has to be approached very carefully. You don't want to say the wrong thing. The potential for saying the wrong thing is very great here."

Mearsheimer was hosted on National Public Radio Tuesday for a full hour, to talk about Iraq, but did not make any mention of the controversial paper he co-authored. "To have a throwaway line or two on public radio to promote yourself is a bad idea," he told the Forward, following his NPR appearance. "I prefer to take the high road, although that is not always easy." Since publication, Mearsheimer added, he and Walt also turned down offers from major newspapers, radio and television networks to lay out their thesis.

This is definitely devastates my hypothesis that could explain away some of the factual gaps in their paper. If that hypothesis is then dismissed I think all we are left with is, as Dan Drezner said, a couple of realists trying to explain away an event that does not fit their way of looking at the world.

2. So what do I have left then if that is debunked, well I think I have two things:

a. The fact that there is still good reason for debate on this issue: I still think Mearsheimer and Walt are correct in many of their arguments for why this is an issue to figure out. Israel does receive extraordinary treatment and that can't be explained away by strategic things like trade or intelligence which we get from other countries without giving billions annually (also you can add the aid we give Egypt, our second largest recipient of aid, as aid to Israel because we give it to them to get along with Israel). A quick note here too, Israel taking out Iraq's nuclear capacity in the 80s is not a reason for continued US support, Israel would have done that with US support or not, that was a move of their own self-interest, not for the sake of the US (although the US could have made it easier to accomplish, but we could have done that anyways).

The moral case to support Israel is debatable and I think that is the point I was hoping Mearsheimer and Walt were making, but if they weren't, I will. Israel is not a David in the region now (although it is a question of whether it was at its start, but not like that matters for us to continue to support them given their absolute advantage now). Also, there is a distinction between initial US support of Israel, in order to ensure its rise to superiority, and continued US support. Israel has all the advantages it could have at this point, partly because of the support the US gives it, partly not. Regardless, we can continue to sell it weapons to sustain it, but we still don't have to give it so much money, for so little in return.

Also, its worth noting that while there might be a moral argument to sustain a Jewish state, given that foreign aid is a zero-sum game, isn't there an even stronger moral argument to provide aid to, like, all of Africa. What is the huge distinction here that necessitates billions to Israel and not to African nations, especially when I am pretty sure Israel would be fine without the billions and Sudanese Christians will not. But this argument is largely neither here nor there, but worth making.

b. The response to this part of the Mearsheimer and Walt argument has largely been irrational. You can go to all the links in my last post and see what people have had to say, and it seems that it has largely been based on the idea that we shouldn't be debating this issue. I hate people who say we shouldn't be debating things, no matter what reason, but especially when those same people are often calling for debate and free expression on all issues but Israel.

Also, to continue the shitting all over David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy, it came to my attention that his only actual critique of the paper (which was only the first paragraph of the paper) is completely wrong. He cites the first paragraph which is:

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world.

He then goes crazy about the fact that the bolded part is wrong and how Israel has never supported the democratization. Well the part he bitches about is not even about Israel, it is about the Lobby that pushes for unwavering support and a neoconservative foreign policy elsewhere, which includes democratizing the region. God I have lost a ton of respect for him over this.

3. Socialization:

I wonder to what extent the US support has propped up Israel's terribly socialized economy. I don't know this first hand, but it seems that the government's economic policy maps more closely to Frances than the United States:

35 billion dollars, over half of the government's budget, which swallows a whopping 55 percent of Israel's GNP, is devoted to transfer payments--has been progressively torn apart by the struggles between conflicting vested interests. And as the power of the parties and of the government weakened, the void was filled by the bureaucracy--(which employs 800,000 people out of Israel's 2.4 million person labor force)

If Israel were weaned off of US economic support and it was forced to end its socialization it could probably become a much more powerful country than it is now.

There will be plenty more on this in the future. Those are some additional thoughts though.

-Mr. Alec

Why is no one critical of Israel?

After a long spell of deep interest in Middle Eastern politics in High School, I have lately grown weary of even thinking about the region, let alone discussing it with the ardent Zionists that I use to love arguing about Israel with. Perhaps best exemplifying the futility of this debate is the heat being generated over an academic paper written by two of the most stellar political scientists alive.

First, the paper (the full thing is here, a shorter and much more accessible version which I read is available here) is entitled "The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy," it is authored by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. I don't know much about Walt, but Mearsheimer is a professor at the University of Chicago (the college I attend). He is legendary amongst students for his stellar lectures in the large lecture class that he annually teaches which is basically his perspective on international relations (offensive realism). He is extremely well regarded by students and despite UChicago's healthy Jewish component I have never heard a murmur about his views of Israel (and why would I, he is an unabashed realist, there are much bigger things to complain about than his views on Israel) [Update: Also, colleague of Mearsheimer, and ex-colleague of Walt, Dan Drezner assures all that there is no anti-Semitism here]. It sucks that I have to mention this before we get into any analysis of what he actually said, but given some of the ad hominem attacks already levied against these two (and given the attacks that will probably be levied in the near future), it seems necessary. Also, Mearsheimer is extremely well respected in his field. I remember a Foreign Policy survey (that I can't find online because I don't subscribe) that listed him as one of the top five most influential scholars of international relations. Walt is of a similar pedigree.

Now their paper attempts to answer the question, "Why does the United States treat Israel so well?" They first discuss the unrivaled treatment that Israel gets from the US:

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.(Emphasis added)

On top of all this, the US has given Israel all this money at great cost to its strategic interests and often with little thanks from Israel:

Backing Israel [is] not cheap, however, and it [has] complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region.

...

A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.

I don't know about you, but this problem definitely seems worth looking at and it is one that gets no attention! (But more on this later.)

Mearsheimer and Walt then refute popular answers to this quandary. The first popular answer is that Israel has and has had key strategic value in the War on Terror and the Cold War (which seems to include a war on terrorists and rouge state in the Middle East). Mearsheimer and Walt contend that this can't be true because in almost every excursion in the Middle East the US has had to go out of its way to distance itself from Israel. Using it as a base for launching invasions of Iraq would be a political disaster. On top of that, they make the controversial, but obviously true point that:

The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Finally, in response to the strategic argument, they simply say that, even if Israel were useful, who cares if these rouge regimes go haywire:

As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards.(Emphasis mine)

This, again is a controversial argument, but this doesn't seem to hold much water (but it also seems to be a mostly worthless argument given what they are trying to achieve, for a more lengthy bit on the reasoning involved in this check this out). The problem with the argument is that while Iran might be unlikely to give any nuclear weapons it develops to terrorist groups, the regime itself is not the most stable and who knows what the future holds for a set of radical Ayatollahs. We were lucky that the transition of power during the fall of the USSR was so easy, who knows if we will get that lucky in the future.

Regardless, with Israel's strategic value dismissed, Mearsheimer and Walt address whether the US provides support to Israel because of any moral imperative. They claim the argument for such support goes like: "Israel is a micron, surrounded by more powerful, evil, Arabs. They are a democracy that we ought to ideologically support given the odds it faces without our support. And we have to support Israel because of the injustices faced by Jews during the Holocaust." Their response goes as such: first, Israel is not an underdog:

Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents. (Emphasis added)

Basically this whole argument could have been condensed into one simple point: they have vastly superior conventional weapons and have nuclear weapons. That goes a long way in any conventional conflict, which is why the Arab world has failed miserably in every conventional with Israel and would continue to fail in the future. This is also why enemies of Israel have resorted to suicide attacks, which are a sign of Israel's strength not weakness.

The second refutation is to the idea that Israel is an ideological ally of the US. First, Mearsheimer and Walt contend that in the history of US foreign policy the US has attacked and supported democracies and it has attacked and supported many dictatorships. I completely agree here, rarely does the US provide support for ideological reasons (think of our treatment of Pakistan now versus our treatment of Mossadeq's Iran). But even if the US did provide such support, Mearsheimer and Walt contend that Israel would certainly not be the first in line for the treatment it gets (note again how this is an unnecessary argument to make given that their first response to the argument seems entire sufficient):

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.

...

Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.

While this is by far the most controversial argument that Mearsheimer and Walt make, it should not surprise anyone. Rigorous studies of exactly what happened during the creation of Israel are not pretty (this book seems to be the most cited, a review is available here). But at its root, all Mearsheimer and Walt are saying here is that Israel is like every other nation state. During its creation it got its hands dirty and it continues to do so thinking that is what is necessary to assure its future existence. I don't think Mearsheimer and Walt are passing any judgment on Israel for doing any of this (remember these guys are realists, morals don't enter into the equation for them), they are simply pointing out that Israel probably doesn't get this special treatment because of any ideological reasons given that its actions are certainly not anything that the US should look up to, ideologically.

Last, Mearsheimer and Walt deal with the Holocaust guilt argument for US support of Israel by simply pointing out that:

The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.

Just like why the US does not afford a carte blanche to Armenians or Rwandans (whose fate was certainly not improved by the US turning a blind eye in both cases) the Holocaust is no reason to blindly provide such support to Israel. But Mearsheimer and Walt think that while all these explanations are lacking, they have one that works.

Given that they can't find any strategic or ideological reasons for the US support of Israel, they place the blame for this ridiculously preferential treatment squarely at the feet of the "Israel Lobby." But before everyone likens this to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mearsheimer and Walt are careful defining what they mean by "Israel Lobby":

We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.

Measheimer and Walt also discuss the tools that this "Lobby" has at its disposal:

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.

A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism...

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.

...

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.

...

No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.

...

Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on...Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.(Emphasis added.)

This is truly the paper at its best and most flawed. It is ridiculous, as some have pointed out, that so much credit can be given to this lobby, especially given troubling countervailing evidence (like things the "Lobby" doesn't call for that would strengthen Israel and things that Mearsheimer and Walt ascribe to the power of the "Lobby" that probably weren't, like the war in Iraq).

But while far too much credit is given to this "Lobby," Mearsheimer and Walt are on point in their discussion of anti-Semitism. Like calling actions racist or likening policies to Nazism, the attack of anti-Semitism is used far too frequently. There is already a group of journalists and bloggers who are all linking to one another and are calling or implying that Mearsheimer and Walt are anti-Semitic. Ironically this does nothing but strengthen the point of the paper. At Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein was quick to infer the accusation of anti-Semitism, despite not having read the actual paper (he just goes ape shit over a meaningless point in the first paragraph). Bernstein is also delighted to link to a number of ridiculous critiques of the paper. The two most prominent links are to a New York Sun editorial and a post by James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal that both attempt to discredit the paper because white supremacist David Duke has come out supporting it. This is just stupid (honestly Volokh Conspiracy has never let me down as much as it did here; hopefully co-bloggers will hold Bernstein accountable). Just because a terrible person likes an idea doesn't discredit the idea, this is a basic fallacy that a paper of the WSJ's, and a scholar of Bernstein's, stature should not be making.

But Taranto goes more in-depth than that, although he concludes his half-assed critique with this gem:

Walt and Mearsheimer's method of analysis presumes Israel's guilt. Every past or present Israeli transgression is evidence of its wickedness, whereas Arab ones, if they are acknowledged at all, are "understandable." This approach paints a highly misleading picture. It is anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.

Wow, I am not sure how to tell Taranto any more bluntly than, "You have completely missed the point you shameless apologist!!!" Mearsheimer and Walt are not arguing that Israel is better or worse than its neighbors, they are simply arguing that it is like every other state and because of this, they should not necessarily be afforded any special treatment. This is not anti-Semitic in any way shape or form. Just as they point out, for many, to criticize Israel, or US treatment of Israel, is now a new type of anti-Semitism, a ridiculous idea.

Bernstein also links to this lengthy critique that also completely misses the point (the main thrust of it is that Israel is better than its neighbors leaving the reader thinking, "uhh...alright"). For some reason many of these intellectuals who are knee-jerk when it comes to Israel think less support of Israel is tantamount to supporting every terrible Arab regime. They immediately become consumed with mentioning every transgression of Saudi Arabia and Iran like that has anything to do with this. Providing a couple less million dollars to Israel is not going to help these groups. Israel got by fine with out US support until after the 1967 war, I doubt they need us to keep doing what they are doing after.

Honestly, I think that all these knee-jerk intellectuals (who Mearsheimer and Walt would probably place in this "Israel Lobby," and why not given how irrational they immediately become) have barely skimmed the article and are resorting to the same arguments they have always made for their Israel apologies (my favorite was someone involved in Campus Watch, an organization that seeks to rid academia of scholars critical of Israel, who challenged Mearsheimer and Walt, "to provide their information that connects this 'Lobby' to my decision to establish Campus Watch," obviously this joker didn't read the definition of "Lobby" and is all too happy to conflate the paper with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion).

But what I love about these knee-jerk intellectuals is that while they are content with using a host of different moves to ensure that there is no debate on the actions of Israel or to what extent the US should support Israel, many are fresh off diatribes about the Mohammed cartoons controversy where they vigorously attacked the idea that certain things can't, in good taste, be depicted or published. While a guy like Bernstein would probably contend that his problem is with people using the law to make sure people can't say certain things (like his book argues), what is the difference between that and the use of epithets and intimidation to limit discourse? There isn't much in the books of many conservatives who frequently lament political correctness as it applies to race and affirmative action or feminism and the military (and are often ardent supporters of Israel). In a post I hope someone makes sure he regrets, Bernstein questioned how Muslims could reject Western liberalism (by acting so illiberally to the publication of the Mohammed cartoons) while accepting the benefits of Western liberalism (improved quality of life as a result of goods from Western economies). Well I wonder how Bernstein could reject such a critical component of intellectual discourse (by resorting to irrational ad hominem attacks on only one issue) while so clearly defending it in other instances and also making a career off of it (as a law professor). I doubt he would enjoy people questioning his sexuality in response to the publication of his book, especially after not even reading it. He has made a career off of not people doing that. It is pretty hypocritical of him to turn on that now. This is the crap that conservatives so frequently attack liberal academics and feminists for doing (and when they do it, their attacks are entirely justified) but then, for many conservatives, when it comes to their own pet project, they abandon all they have ever preached. Gar!

But to get back to Mearsheimer and Walt, the feeling I got was that their paper was that it was created primarily to spark this debate about this issue (Dan Drezner thinks they were shooting for the "full Huntington"). Why else include lengthy, controversial sections, knowing full well that the same point could be made without offending anyone? I don't know much about political science papers, but the fact that this was reworked and published online seems not to be a coincidence. The only reason to do all these things would be to generate attention and irrational responses. With that in mind, I think you get a radically different view of the paper. Many of their mischaracterizations become forgivable, while many of their most basic arguments against the US providing such unflinching support for Israel given how much we actually get back remains strong. It is a given that the US goes to extraordinary lengths to help Israel and it is worthwhile to consider why the hell we do that. Too frequently this debate is maligned by accusations of anti-Semitism or comparisons to the Elders of the Protocols of Zion. This is why I stopped arguing about Israel and why I am all too happy to let the region go to hell. This is why I am thrilled that two tenured scholars have chosen to create some controversy, especially when a group of Israeli apologists are manhandling the debate on the issue, ensuring it comes out their way.

One of my favorite comments was from the American Thinker which rhetorically asked how these things could come, "From a 'scholar' who teaches future leaders in America?" That got me thinking, who would I rather take a class from, a scholar that would question anything in an attempt to find the truth, or a hypocritical ideologue? I'm looking forward to taking Mearsheimer's "War and the Nation State" next year.

-Mr. Alec

The bible's place in classrooms

It is a welcome development that Georgia has passed a law that would allow its schools to teach elective classes on the Old and New Testament from a literary and historical perspective (via Volokh).

While it is obviously worrisome how the Bible would be taught in Georgia, it is a text unrivaled cultural and intellectual significance. Any intellectual history of the Western world ought to give ample time to it. But for some reason it tends to get pushed aside and this is not just a problem in our public schools; but also in colleges. I have spent seven quarters learning a ridiculous amount of "social and political thought" over the past two years in college, but outside of a once readinga passage on David and Golliath (in order to better understand my favorite, Machiavelli) I have no contact with the Bible. And even if I wanted to go out of my way to have some interaction with the Bible, I believe there is only one class offered, and it is only on the New Testament!

Of course, if I went to a school where it was easy to find a class on the Bible, I would probably suffer elsewhere (like the host of daily restrictions people have that go to religious schools or the lack of skepticism neccesary for proper academic inquiry), but it is unfortunate that right now the two seem to be mutually exclusive, and given the growing contention between church and state lately, I doubt this is a tradeoff that is going to go away.

Oh well.

-Mr. Alec

South Park vs. Tom Cruise and Scientology (Part Deux)

South Park has come along way over the past couple of years. At its start it was nothing more than raunchy bathroom humor (the pinnacle of that being Mr. Hankey, a magical piece of poop that emerges from the toilet during Christmas to give presents to boys and girls with diets rich in fiber). But since then South Park has grown, and it seems to have supplanted the Simpson’s as the best cultural commentary one can find on TV. This is not so much a result of episodes that are all that funny or well written. Some of its most famous episodes, like the Mel Gibson, Wal-Mart, or Scientology episodes still suffer from extreme adolescence. What makes South Park so effective is that it a holistic experience. It is part television show, part news-maker itself.

South Park also tends to take on unpopular groups that are ripe for satire. This is why few can help but get behind its attack on Scientology and Tom Cruise. While satirizing Tom Cruise's potential homosexuality (and who can blame them given Cruise's bizzare relationship with Katie Holmes), the episode features an animated rendition of Scientology's secret teachings. Not only is the whole Xenu and Thetan soul bit ridiculous, but it is obviously the root of the dangerous and irrational teachings that motivate the minions of this cult. Best exemplifying these teachings are a litany of incidents involving Tom Cruise that include this famous shouting match between Cruise and Matt Lauer on the Today Show where Cruise claimed "vitamins and exercise" was the best cure for severe psychiatric disorders (or there is the interview where Cruise called psychiatry a "Nazi science"). Clearly this was not only a group ripe for parody but also well deserving of it.

But in response to the parody Scientologists and Cruise have done nothing but drum up more attention and support for South Park. Cruise went so far as to repeatedly threaten to sue anyone who broadcast the episode in Britain (this is because Britain's standards for libel, slander, and defamation are much lower than those in the United States). Apparently, he also threatened to—if Comedy Central re-ran the episode—stop promoting Mission Impossible: III, which is being produced by a parent company of Comedy Central. The creators of South Park had this hilarious response to these efforts:

So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!

- Trey Parker and Matt Stone, servants of the dark lord Xenu."

What's clear is that Parker and Stone (and South Park) have gotten the best of Scientology and Cruise. They have drummed up enormous attention for their show while mocking a bizarre religion, and all in the name of free-speech! (If only Tom Cruise could promote his movies with similar effectiveness.)

Kudos to South Park for taking on Scientology, and having so much fun doing it, if only all controversies stemming from cartoons that satirized religion were such good clean fun.

-Mr. Alec

PS To watch the actual scientology episode click here.

Saddam and Zarqawi

While Christopher Hitchens is using the evil of al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a reason to reinvigorate the fight in Iraq and the Weekly Standard is trying for the 80th time to draw a link between Saddam and al Qaeda, it turns out Saddam was just as interested in getting rid of Zarqawi as the United States is now.

Juan Cole points that recently released documents show that Saddam felt Zarqawi was a threat to his regime and in August of 2002 called on an intelligence officer to capture the terrorist.

My favorite part of this news is that it sticks it to both Saddam and Bush/Cheney. Saddam for now encouraging an insurgency led by a man that he would have happily murdered four years ago and Bush/Cheney for once using Zarqawi as a way to link Saddam with al Qaeda.

Too bad this has received next to no press.

-Mr. Alec

The media's bias we should actually care about

While the most famous bias of the media is its sway towards liberal policies, there is a much more prominent and dangerous bias that has been extremely prominent lately. More and more the news (and by the news I mean the New York Times) is being catered to an extremely small percentage of Americans. Just this week the New York Times has run articles on the plight of female lawyers unable to make partner in big law firms, the anxiety of teens applying to top colleges, and a set (here and here) of articles on the SAT scoring controversy.

The common thread amongst all of these articles is that next to no one cares. How many people are actually high profile lawyers are big law firms? How many people have shitty, minimum wage jobs? I'd argue that there are a lot more of the former than the latter and I'd also bet that the low income fast-food worker won't be shedding any tears for the woman out of law school who is pulling in half a million but can't make partner.

On top of that, it is time to be realist about college. Only 11% of high school students go to colleges that reject a majority of applicants, and I'd be willing to be that only a slightly higher percentage apply to more than a handful of state and community colleges (not the obscene number that many of the top tier college bound seniors apply to). For these students, a discrepancy on their SAT score is meaningless. The much bigger issue for most American students, as Matthew Yglesias points out, is not getting into the college, but getting out with a diploma:

Only 37 percent of college students graduate in four years, less than two-thirds finish in six. For low-income and minority students, graduation rates are even worse.

While the media clearly does this to pander to that pay to read the newspaper, the trouble is that it makes the lawyer whose son is applying to top-tier colleges think he is an average guy. I always find it ridiculous to hear people whose annual incomes exceed 150 to 200 thousand a year classify themselves as "middle class." Median annual income in the US is around 43 thousand, but you would never know it from reading the New York Times. For the vast majority of Americans the question is not which ivy league college, but whether to go to college at all. Its time the media acknowledge these realities, as opposed to making what ought to be a story buried on A20, front page news.

-Mr. Alec

South Park vs. Scientology

I have written a much longer analysis on the South Park controversy, but I want to edit it tomorrow so that it is cogent, so in the meantime, the much discussed episode is now online, available for free.

Check it out before it is taken down, and take solace in the fact that with each passing minute you are sticking it to Tom Cruise and Scientology.

Click here for the full episode.


-Mr. Alec

Brooks and Plato

David Brooks had an excellent column yesterday that discussed the power of this unknown power of the soul in society. There is little dispute that two of the parts of soul are the parts that desires the most base of pleasures and the part that desires wisdom. In his column Brooks discusses the significance of a potential third part of the soul that drives men to:

wear the sports jerseys of semiliterate behemoths half their age while others customize their cars with so many speakers they sound like the hip-hop version of the San Francisco earthquake as they roll down the street.

Brooks attributes this unique sort of action to the part of the soul that desires "recognition." He attributes this to Plato, who he claims, divided the soul into these three parts (regardless, Plato does not do this, instead Socrates makes this argument in Plato's Republic, too often Socrates in Plato's dialogues are made out to be the opinions of Plato, something I reject having read sections like 540d-541b of the Republic).

Brooks then goes on to urge politicians not to be so consumed by their urge for recognition:

If I had the attention of the world's politicians for one afternoon, I'd lead a discussion on the nature of the thymotic urge. I'd point out that if politicians weren't consumed by a hunger for recognition, none of them would agree to lead the miserable lives they do. I'd point out that in the thymotic urge, selfishness and selflessness are intertwined. Men compete for personal glory. But thymos also induces them to sacrifice for causes larger than themselves.

Brooks is spot-on here in his diagnosis, it is shocking how closely his description of these politicians so closely maps with Socrates' timocratic man, the one who lets his urge for recognition overwhelm the rest of his soul (Republic 549c-550c). Brooks is also correct in pointing out the value of the urge for recognition.

But Brooks' cure is not the solution (at least not under the guise of the Republic). A discussion amongst these won't achieve anything because the fundamental problem is that we are continually electing men whose souls are consumed with the desire to for recognition and honor. While there is an upside to this, it is not until this part of the soul is ruled by the part that desires wisdom that things are as they ought to be (argues Socrates). Concordantly, let’s start electing philosophers and stop electing proud fools.

-Mr. Alec

New Jersey politics

It seems that the Mayor of Newark, New Jersey has never been opposed to theatrics. When delivering his signatures for reelection, four years ago, he used a cart covered in his campaign slogan, "The Real Deal." But this year he has outdone himself. The 70 year old, five-time Mayor of Newark, road a bike wearing a tank-top and gym shorts to deliver 10,000 signatures (you only need 1,159 to qualify) to the city clerk...

Whoever said politics wasn't exciting?

-Mr. Alec

PS This post was purely an excuse to put up that picture.

Race and intelligence

Steven Levitt has never had a problem studying issues that make people squirm and I am not just referring to his abortion study, his study on the impact of names is equally, if not more discomforting. It was there that he concluded:

The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name—whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn—does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake. But it isn't the fault of his or her name. If two black boys, Jake Williams and DeShawn Williams, are born in the same neighborhood and into the same familial and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes. But the kind of parents who name their son Jake don't tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. And that's why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn. DeShawn's name is an indicator—but not a cause—of his life path.

Regardless, he is now looking at race and intelligence and trying to find whether one has much of any impact on the other. He explains what much research has found up until now:

...research has consistently found that Black teenagers underperform White teenagers by an average of about one standard deviation on tests of IQ and academic achievement. Substantial racial test score gaps are found as early as age five.

A full standard deviation is an enormous gap, but a new paper that he co-wrote is not only reporting that blacks and whites score about the same, but also that if any race does the worst, it is Asians (the race that has historically always out performed the competition):

Using a newly available nationally representative data set that includes a test of mental function for children aged eight to twelve months, we find only minor racial differences in test outcomes (0.06 standard deviation units in the raw data) between Blacks and Whites that disappear with the inclusion of a limited set of controls. The only statistically significant racial difference is that Asian children score slightly worse than those of other races. To the extent that there are any genetically-driven racial differences in intelligence, these gaps must either emerge after the age of one, or operate along dimensions not captured by this early test of mental cognition.

Studies like this only reaffirm my decision to become an economics major (especially after taking my economics final this morning!).

-Mr. Alec

Oh boy

Watch what you search for...

-Mr. Alec

Populism gone terribly awry

That seems to be becoming the theme of the decade for South America (except for Chile, thanks to Milty and the Chicago Boys). Anyways, Argentina just imposed one of the dumbest economic policies I've read about in awhile. The jist of it is, Argentina is going to ban exportation of its most profitable good: beef. Essentially what will happen is supply will spike in the short-run because of overproduction (as has already happened). Then producers will cut back on their production because they are losing money. This will cause the price to shoot back up again (it would be hilarious if it went above the value now which is possible if there are economies of scale). The huge downside is that Argentina is losing its most profitable export which is going to do nothing for an already debilitated economy.

Long live the Bolivarian revolution...

-Mr. Alec

PS I am reading Amy Chua's World on Fire right now to get an alternative take on globalization, especially as it applies to South America. Expect more on that soon.

Saddam

Turns out Saddam was not just good at hiding his WMDs from us, but also from his own generals!

The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense.

Man would that suck to be one of those generals at that point...

Read the whole article, it is really interesting to see how fucked up stuff was in Iraq.

-Mr. Alec

Usher helps minorities by providing false hope

So it seems like the pop singer Usher has decided that he is finally going to give back to the community. Unfortunately I doubt anyone will notice the change.

Apparently he is going to give a seminar at a black and Hispanic teen leadership conference on how to succeed in sports and entertainment. But why is this getting him good press? He is going to do nothing but provide these teenagers, most likely disadvantaged, with false hope of making it in sports or entertainment. Few to none ever succeed in these businesses. I have no clue how many, but I am sure a fair number of teens do drop out of school, or choose not to go to college to try to make it. Economically, this is one of the worst life choices anyone could make. I know we like to pretend that people should pursue their dreams, but how about we tell that to college students who have an education to fall back on, not impressionable teens.

Wouldn't these teens be better off if he just shut up and spent some of his millions to get books into their classrooms?

-Mr. Alec

Larry Summers

I feel a little silly posting this here because, first of all, it is from the University of Chicago perspective, but also because two days after this was published the U of C announced who its new president was (it was not Larry Summers).

Oh well. I still think my column makes a strong point about the role of University presidents today, and I do think Larry Summers would make a fantastic president somewhere else (or at Harvard again).

Many U of C students loath Harvard. It is consistently ranked as one of the top colleges in the nation and universities in the world. It attracts some of the brightest faculty and students. Its endowment is nearly as large as Yale and Stanford’s combined.

But the past year has shown that there is trouble in paradise. Harvard has serious problems—some not unique to Harvard at all. Harvard was graduating entire classes with honors because of rampant grade inflation. Its top-notch professors weren’t teaching. Some weren’t even taking time from their busy schedule of speaking engagements to research or write academic papers. Its undergraduate curriculum was a mess, giving broad distributional credits for undeniably lame classes.

When Larry Summers became president of Harvard, he made it his goal to address these problems. But in his attempt at making the role of a university president more than chief fundraiser he became too much of a threat to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) power.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came when Summers edged out the dean of the FAS who was stalling on the necessary curriculum changes. This prompted the FAS to force a second vote of no confidence which could have proven fatal for his presidency. In order to avoid embarrassment, Summers stepped down.

The sad thing throughout this whole ordeal is that Summers has been played as some tactless brute who was just not cut out for the job. Summers’s comments regarding women in science were those of a curious academic—the type of person that ought to be running universities. The dean of the FAS that Summers forced out was roundly disliked until he was fired. The FAS placed him on a pedestal when it realized it could use the event as a way to force a second vote of no confidence.

Perhaps the biggest vote of confidence in Summers—the manager, academic, and reformer—was the fact that he was well regarded by everyone but the FAS. The students, by an overwhelming majority, loved him. He taught freshman seminars and lecture courses. The faculty of the professional schools adored him. And why shouldn’t they, he was making the university a better place for them.

To blame the resignation on any aspect of Summers’s personality is to completely miss the point. In his attempts at reform, he upset the almighty and entirely unaccountable tenured professors of Arts and Sciences. Many did not want the president determining their dean, urging them to do research, or calling them out on their failure to teach. He was forced out because he tried to force reform on a group of tenured professors who wanted none of it.

But Summers’s experience is becoming the norm. Presidents are either frustrated reformers or fundraising figureheads. Not that President Randel is neccesarily one or the other, but it is sad that every press release detailing his success at the U of C focuses on the amount of money he has raised. Whatever happened to university presidents as intellectual lions, like Ezra Cornell, William Rainey Harper, or Robert Maynard Hutchins? Today it seems that too often university presidents choose the path of least resistance. Larry Summers attempted to break that mold, to bring Harvard into the next century; all he got was disgrace and embarrassment.

In the coming months the U of C will be announcing its next president. While we are not a perfect university, we don’t have nearly the same structural problems as Harvard. But still, it doesn’t seem to be asking too much for a president who is willing to do what is necessary to make the curricular reforms the U of C needs, take on lazy and stagnant faculty, and fearlessly make academic inquiry.

Larry Summers anyone?

-Mr. Alec

PS If you are a U of C student, you should check out this great post by Crescat Sententia's Will Baude about U of C and Harvard animosity. I have to say though, that I don't share his sentiment for Harvard (although there have been times when I have felt bitter about not being at Yale or Stanford--especially during winter quarter--but that always melts away when I realize that I'd be a huge tool--as opposed to a huge geek--if I went to either school).

-Mr. Alec

Silence

Sorry things have been so quiet. It has been a combination of last week being kinda slow newswise and this week me being extremely busy.

Unforunately things will probably remain quiet until next week, but some awesome stuff is brewing but I don't want to announce anything until it is going to happen.

-Mr. Alec