The lure of government work

In discussions of the financial crisis, I have often heard it argued that the financial industry did some of its harm by luring intelligent and capable people away from industries that actually do more good. Rather than applying their knowledge to improving technologies, teaching the young, or providing valuable services, they spent their time earning millions for the partners at big investment banks.

It occurs to me that something a bit similar may happen with government. In many ways, government jobs are the best ones left in society. While there are strong reasons to doubt whether the pension plans will actually exist in thirty years, they do provide a good deal to people who will be retiring soon. They also provide good benefits, flexibility, high rates of pay, generous family provisions, and job security. As an unintended consequence of all that, they might be acting like the banks did – drawing in some of Canada’s most promising people, keeping them in place with generous pay and benefits, but ultimately not putting them to very good use in a lot of cases.

Economists talk about how high interest rates on government bonds can ‘crowd out’ private investment. It is easy to see how this could be the case. When a private organization needs to repay a loan, they need to earn money to do so by selling goods or services. The government, by contrast, can simply raise taxes or print money. The government also enjoys the highest level of public confidence, in that people fully expect it to repay its debts. As a result, people may find it safer and more profitable to lend their money to governments than to firms. At the same time, it is not always the case that governments will use that money well. They might, for instance, use it to fund wasteful undertakings like building hockey arenas or hosting big international sporting competitions. They might squander it on costly and unnecessary weapon systems, or on trying to buy votes in marginal constituencies, or doing favours for their friends in the private sector or their political allies.

Often, it is within the power of government to offer people the best deal available, when they are choosing how to invest their money or time. What governments should remain aware of – however – is the risk that in doing so they will be drawing people away from better uses of their energies and skills. Canada would probably be better off if some of the underused people within government were off doing productive work in some other sector instead.

Oil prices and presidential prospects

Over on FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver is arguing that there is little evidence that high oil prices reduce the chance of re-election for an American president, except indirectly as they affect GDP, inflation and unemployment.

Silver does highlight that a return to recession can be expected to significantly diminish President Obama’s re-election prospects. That’s the sort of political incentive that can favour urgent activity to encourage economic growth and reduce unemployment, potentially at the expense of the long-term stability of the economic system.

On sexual education

A friend of mine works for an organization that teaches sex education classes in high schools. After a recent presentation, there was a barrage of complaints from parents who were offended that their high-school-aged children were being told how to put on condoms, and that masturbation is a risk-free alternative to sex. I can somewhat understand the psychology of parents, insofar as I can recognize the signs of people struggling desperately to retain control of something they feel as though they own. At the same time, I think their complaints should be dismissed completely.

Human bodies are incredibly complex things, which is why medical school is one of the most challenging intellectual undertakings people can take on. At the same time, every human being possesses such a body and has a right to understand at least the most important things about it. Those include understanding their own nature as sexual beings (and, yes, twelve-year-olds are already sexual beings), as well as knowing the facts about human sex and reproduction. They have the right to know about the risks associated with different sexual acts, and the mechanisms that are available for reducing those risks. They also have the right to know about the psychology and sociology of human sexuality: that being gay isn’t a sign of being unhealthy, that there is a whole spectrum of preference when it comes to sexual acts and partners, and that standards of sexual morality vary across time and space.

There is an especially insidious argument made sometimes that suggests that children should be made fearful of sex, in order to keep them from trying it. Firstly, this argument fails on a factual basis. Keeping kids ignorant will not stop them from experimenting. What it will keep them from doing is taking precautions like using barriers and contraception, talking with their parents and doctors, and generally making informed choices. This argument also fails from a moral perspective. For one group of people to decide that a thing should not be done, then agree to use misinformation to trick everyone else into acting that way, is insidious, paternalistic, and duplicitous. By all means, if you can use logic and evidence to convince people to agree with your views, do so. If you need to lie to them, however, there is a good chance that your perspective is actually incorrect.

Parents obviously have a role in keeping their children safe and in shaping their views about the world. At the same time, they have no right whatsoever to keep their children in ignorance about something as important as their own health and safety, or the functioning of their own bodies and reproductive systems. When schools cave to parental pressure and intentionally maintain the ignorance of some children, they are making the same kind of ethical mistake as fundamentalist governments make when they ban heresy or censor the news. One person’s patronizing impulse doesn’t create a valid justification for the suppression of important knowledge and information. Children should be educated about sex, and it should be done by taking the best scientific evidence we have available and making it as comprehensible as possible for people who have their level of general education.

More controversially, I think it is appropriate to tell students that sex is a natural and joyful part of human life, not something they should be fearful or ashamed of. It can be argued that this steps outside the bounds of science and objectivity, but I would question that on the basis of Sam Harris’ general argument about science and ethics. It is possible to distinguish between societies that enable human flourishing and those that suppress it, and those distinctions are valid in a way that can be demonstrated scientifically. Societies that treat sex exclusively as something shameful, dangerous, and secret seem likely to be comprehensively worse than those that treat it as something positive with risks that can be managed in intelligent ways.

Japan’s earthquake and nuclear power plants

This is scary:

The explosion [at Japan’s Fukushima plant], he said, was due to hydrogen buildup in the steam piping that mixed with oxygen, and that there was no damage to the container with the nuclear fuel. TEPCO has been filling the container with seawater combined with boric acid to cool the reactor, which Mr Edano called an “unprecedented” remedy. Boric acid, as well as being a strong neutron absorber to prevent the nuclear fuel from overheating, will also make the reactor much harder to get running again.

I wasn’t worried until they began taking steps that could undermine the future operation of the reactor. If they are running those risks now, they must really be worried about what could happen if they do not set things right.

Also, it is virtually guaranteed that the company running the plant and the Japanese government will play down the seriousness of the accident to the greatest possible degree. That suggests it may be worse than reported so far.

Choosing nuclear power involves special risks.

Precedents and interpretation on privilege

Those following the news may find it interesting from a legal and historical perspective to read up on the precedents involving privileges and immunities within the Parliament of Canada.

The most authoritative text on the subject is probably House of Commons Procedure and Practice. It includes an entire chapter on privileges and immunities. It makes being a Member of Parliament sound pretty good, though the rights of the House as a collectivity far eclipse those of individual members.

If you really want to read up on the rules of Parliament – specifically the Confidence Convention – O’Brien and Bosc recommend:

For further information, see Forsey, E.A. and Eglington, G.C., “The Question of Confidence in Responsible Government”, study prepared for the Special Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons, Ottawa, 1985. Also of interest are the First and Third Reports of the Special Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons (the McGrath Committee) respectively presented to the House on December 20, 1984 (Journals, p. 211) and June 18, 1985 (Journals, p. 839), as well as Desserud, D., “The Confidence Convention under the Canadian Parliamentary System”, Canadian Study of Parliament Group: Parliamentary Perspectives, No. 7, October 2006.

Or you could have a life and not be a total procedural nerd – your choice.

Selling F15s

Does it strike anyone else as strange and somewhat objectionable that the United States is selling the F-15 attack aircraft to Saudi Arabia? Before being supplanted with the F22 and F35, the F15 had unmatched capabilities. As such, you need to wonder whether the United States would be better off keeping sales of the old plane restricted and being less bothered about developing new generations of attack aircraft during an era where they already possess complete air superiority.

A cynical perspective is that this all comes down to the arms industry. They can’t sell F-15s to the United States anymore, so they want new customers. Even better, they know that the United States will feel threatened by F15s in the hands of potentially unstable regimes like Saudi Arabia, and that the US will respond by purchasing more F22, F35s, and other hardware.

It’s like a gun shop that sells its newest weapons only to its best customers, but progressively makes each new weapon available to anyone with the cash. That keeps the best customers locked on an upgrade pathway and keeps weapon designers in business. Unfortunately, it also makes the world a riskier place, and wastes substantial resources that could be better applied to reducing poverty or building a more sustainable society.

Republican speculation, via psychic powers

The other night, talking with my friend Jessica, it occurred to me that it could be possible to set up a kind of internet sensation based around the upcoming American presidential election (how early they become ‘upcoming’!) and ‘psychic’ claims of the sort that made an octopus famous during the World Cup. All you would need is pictures of all the plausible Republican contenders and some mechanism for deciding who among them will win on the basis of supposed supernatural powers. An octopus could work. Another idea would be a very young baby, the cuter the better.

In order to draw things out and give advertisers time to start hocking their wares alongside your videos, you could follow a process of elimination, in which candidates are rejected rather than selected. Naturally, you would want to rig the selections so as to produce the most total viewership. A good idea would be to do something a bit controversial at the outset – like reject Sarah Palin. Then, start working through the no-hope candidates as you are building momentum. Rigging the outcomes would be incredibly easy: just keep making videos until you get one where your preferred selection is made.

By the end of the Republican primary competition, when there are only a few plausible candidates left in the race, there would be a reasonable chance that you could simply guess correctly, cementing the reputation of your chosen psychic vessel as the real deal, at least in the eyes of a credulous few. Naturally, you would then want to make a prediction on the actual election. Chances are, you will be able to guess correctly on the basis of sophisticated polling of the Nate Silver variety, along with an assessment of key economic indicators.

If you wanted to keep exploiting the gullibility that seems widespread within the general public, you could use your advertising earnings as seed money to start a cult.

Reader survey: news sources

Out of curiosity, where do readers of this blog regularly turn for news?

I look at a diversity of sources myself. I listen to CBC Radio 1 in the morning before work. I also sometimes listen to it during the evenings and weekends. I listen to the “This American Life” and “National Public Radio: Planet Money” podcasts, though not always in timely fashion.

Every week, I read The Economist from cover to cover, though I will admit to skimming some articles, especially in the finance and business sections. I at least glance through the headlines of The Globe and Mail and The Ottawa Citizen every day. I also keep an eye on Google News and have some Google Alerts set up. When I have excess time on my hands, I look at the websites for The New York Times, Slate, and Stratfor. I track hundreds of blogs via RSS (using Google Reader, since the shutdown threat at BlogLines), but I rarely have time to even scan through post titles in detail. I try to at least scan through posts on Slashdot and Boing Boing. People also email me a lot of articles and links.

When I have time, I watch “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show”, but that is the only television I watch with any kind of regularity. I also check out The Onion periodically.

I also try to keep up to speed on important non-fiction books, especially in areas closely related to climate change.

Taxation isn’t slavery

There is an argument that libertarians sometimes make that equates taxation to slavery. They say that your money is a representation of your time, since you need to put in time to earn it. As such, someone who takes your money is effectively taking your time, and thus making you their slave.

The problem I see with this argument is the claim that taking up any part of your time is akin to slavery. For someone to utterly dominate your life is a much worse situation than for someone to periodically demand a quantity of your time. More than a few societies have been structured in exactly that way: people paid their taxes in the form of labour or military service. Calling upon people to sacrifice some of their time, in exchange for getting to live in a good society, is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.

Thus, taxation is not immoral, because it is not akin to slavery.

Security in prisons

For the good of society at large, it does make sense to isolate some particularly dangerous people from the general population. At the same time, society has an obligation to manage imprisonment in a sensible way, including by avoiding the vindictive temptation to make prisons themselves Hobbesian jungles in which those who are incarcerated have no personal security, and only bad examples to follow. Rather than locking up more and more people in worse and worse conditions, we should lock up fewer and treat them better. The probable result of that is less cost and harm to society, along with a chance at genuine rehabilitation for those who do commit crimes.

Sending non-violent offenders to prison doesn’t really make any sense. This is particularly true when it comes to non-violent drug criminals: a class that includes ordinary users, but also producers and smugglers. Treating drugs as a criminal problem only makes them more problematic for society by making them a lucrative racket for organized crime groups, and by ensuring that those who operate in this business can only settle disputes through violence. As with alcohol and gambling, society should recognize that prohibition causes more harm than good and undertake a transition from a drug policy founded on criminal law to one founded on evidence-based medicine and harm reduction.

Similarly, having prisons in which inmates fear for their personal safety doesn’t make sense. Living with that kind of stress simply has to be harmful to the human mind, and likely to exacerbate whatever issues led to their imprisonment in the first place. When someone is branded with a criminal record and ‘ex-convict’ status, it already becomes hard enough for them to sustain themselves and any dependents financially in the future. Adding traumatic years of fear and violence to that can only worsen things.

Plausibly, reducing the prison population by excluding non-violent offenders could allow for more resources to be devoted to each prisoner who remains. These could allow for greater personal security, through measures like reducing over-crowding, and for genuine rehabilitation programs focused on things like addressing existing addiction problems and developing skills that are in demand in job markets.

The idea that criminals are bad people who deserve to be punished for their wickedness probably belongs in the Middle Ages. As we learn more about human psychology, we learn that people are profoundly influenced by the environments they inhabit and that people respond in predictable ways to circumstances like stress and deprivation. Rather than seeing criminals as wicked individuals who should be expelled from society to the greatest possible degree, I think it makes sense to have a bit more pragmatism and compassion and to establish systems that minimize the harmfulness of crime while giving criminals better options.