11:46 AM :: Stephen (contact)

News Inflation: The A.P. ran a story a few days ago reporting that oil prices had pushed past $50 a barrel:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, will raise its production capacity by nearly 5 percent to 11 million barrels a day in an attempt to rein in prices that topped $50 a barrel for the first time, the oil ministry said Tuesday. . . .

Word of the decision came as crude oil topped $50 per barrel on Tuesday, pushing past the psychological milestone for the first time.

Traders bid oil over $50 a barrel in Asian trading after the November crude contract settled at a 21-year high of $49.64 on Monday on the New York Mercantile Exchange in a reaction to the slow recovery of U.S. oil production that was damaged by Hurricane Ivan and unrest and terrorism fears in key producers Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Nigeria.

To their credit, in the very last paragraph, they also note that the $50-a-barrel figure (and the talk of a "21-year high") is historically meaningless:

Still, adjusting for inflation, today's prices are still more than $30 a barrel below the level reached in 1981 after the Iranian revolution. Economists also point out that the country is more energy efficient than it was two decades ago -- due to conservation measures taken after prices skyrocketed and because the industrial sector has shrunk dramatically.

This sort of thing has bothered me for a long time. I'm not sure why reporters and editors--who should know better--continue to write breathless articles on large nominal figures (the most expensive hurricane in history, etc.), even when the real figures are completely unexceptional. Or, for that matter, why they repeat claims that the deficit is "the largest in history," when what really matters is deficit as a share of GDP. In many ways, this "news" is only news to people who've never heard about inflation.

I'm sure it makes for good copy, and probably sells more papers than "Deficit Large, But Not Unprecedented." Maybe the news value is in the fact that other people pay attention to nominal values--the "psychological milestone." (But isn't that psychology itself a creature of the media?) And it's also a perennial source of scare headlines, since as inflation continues, virtually any monetary quantity will eventually become "the largest in history." But aren't there some editors out there sufficiently committed to accuracy to keep these non-stories from running?

 

5:51 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Adventures in Contract Enforcement: It all started as an uneventful Halloween. Then Cookie Monster repossessed our television...

On Halloween night in 1991, three Rent-A-Center employees in Utica, N.Y., dressed up, respectively, as the Cookie Monster, a gorilla and an alien life form and knocked on a customer's door. Once inside, they successfully repossessed a home-entertainment system on which payments hadn't been made in almost three months. Gary Gerhardt, the store manager who blessed this plan, calls the ruse "a last-ditch effort," adding, "it was the only way we could think to get someone in the door."

From Alix M. Freedman, A Marketing Giant Uses its Sales Prowess to Profit on Poverty, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 22, 1993, p. A12.

 

1:14 PM :: Stephen (contact)

We Will Not Tolerate a Nuclear Bhutan:Josh notes that Lichtenstein has now ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and we can all sleep more soundly. (This presumably comes after that nation's first nuclear test rendered much of the small principality uninhabitable.) A number of nations, such as Cuba and North Korea, have never even signed the treaty. Other non-signatories to the treaty, however, include:

• The Bahamas.


• Barbados.


• Bhutan.


• Dominica. (No, not the Dominican Republic, but Dominica. According to its official website, "The youngest island in the Caribbean, erosion has yet to dull the sharpness of her terrain. Beautiful dramatic angles are everywhere. Energetic rivers run vigorously." On nuclear power, perhaps? For why else would the first item under "Things to See & Do" be "Our Boiling Lake"?)


• Niue. (Don't believe this one exists? It's not surprising -- the Niue Tourism Office describes it as "undiscovered," "unspoiled," and "unbelievable.")


• St. Vincent and the Grenadines.


• Tonga.


• Trinidad and Tobago.

All in all, I'd say Lichtenstein's the least of our problems. We're looking at the prospect of a nuclear-armed Caribbean any day now. And as Tom Lehrer wrote,

Luxembourg is next to go,
And (who knows?) maybe Monaco.
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb.

 

3:23 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Thought for the Day: From Hannah Arendt's On Violence:

In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi's enormously powerful and successful strategy of nonviolent resistance had met with a different enemy -- Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England -- the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission. However, England in India and France in Algeria had good reasons for their restraint. Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost; it is precisely the shrinking power of the Russian government, internally and externally, that became manifest in its 'solution' to the Czechoslovak problem...

 

3:44 PM :: Stephen (contact)

The Many Perils: I received my renter's insurance policy in the mail this morning, and was surprised to learn of the various "perils" against which my apartment is now protected. I had no idea the world was so perilous a place. Among the standard set -- fire, lightning, theft, windstorm, hail (except for "loss to watercraft") -- I'm also protected against "Explosion," "Vehicles," and "Riot or Civil Commotion, including pillage and looting" (should the Vikings return, and their dragon-prowed ships drop anchor in the port of New Haven).

Another clause offers coverage for damage caused by "Aircraft, including self-propelled missiles and spacecraft." I wonder which Allstate actuary sat down and calculated the chances of damage due to falling spacecraft; yet it's comforting to know, in case I end up with a chunk of Mir sticking out of my apartment, that I'll be insured. (There's no limitation on the spacecraft's initial point of departure, so presumably I'm also protected against any UFOs that should make crash landings in Connecticut. A full-scale alien invasion, of course, would be outside the coverage limit, which does not include "War or warlike acts, including but not limited to insurrection, rebellion or revolution," unless the aliens are sufficiently playful as to be categorized under "Vandalism and Malicious Mischief." I'd also be out of luck if the aliens use their toxic chemicals on us, since the policy does not cover "any bodily injury which results in any manner from the discharge, dispersal, release, or escape of vapors, fumes, acids, toxic chemicals, toxic gases, toxic liquids, toxic solids, waste materials or other irritants, contaminants or pollutants." Unless, of course, "such discharge . . . is sudden and accidental." No comment.)

A few other miscellaneous perils go uncovered, including "Nuclear action, meaning nuclear reaction, discharge, radiation or radioactive contamination," which will not be considered "loss by fire, explosion or smoke." Nor am I protected against "Earth movement of any type, including but not limited to earthquake, volcanic eruption, lava flow, landslide, subsidence, mudflow, pressure, sinkhole, erosion, or the sinking, rising, shifting, creeping (!), expanding, bulging, cracking, settling, or contracting (!!) of the earth." (Damage caused by the expansion or contraction of the universe receives no mention.) Finally, there's no information on whether I'm insured against damage caused by asteroids (unless considered "Falling Objects"), ravenous wolves, monster attacks, or a giant swarm of bees. I'll be on the phone to Allstate first thing Monday morning.

UPDATE: My brother writes to remind me that there's another grave peril Allstate doesn't cover: Robots. Attack by Robots.

 

2:27 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Stranger Than Fiction: At the Weekly Standard, life imitates art.

 

5:08 PM :: Stephen (contact)

The Alchemy of Parental Choice, Part II: Steve Wu comments on the post below, noting the distinction between a voucher program designed to achieve a secular goal (like improving education) and one designed to funnel government money to religious institutions, as an end run around the First Amendment.

I don't know anything about the relevant First Amendment jurisprudence, but on a moral level, I'm not sure what to make of this objection. For one thing, it seems like there will always be some secular goal that could reasonably be advanced by a voucher program. Assume that in a given town, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, there is only one public school and one Catholic school. A voucher program would thus be identical in practice to a direct subsidy of Catholic education. Even then, however, the Catholic school might be very good, with vouchers serving the secular goal of improving education for children; or the inter-school competition might be said to spur improvements in the public school, serving a similar goal; or families may just like the Catholic school better, serving a value-neutral goal of preference satisfaction. Why should it matter if the government intentionally uses the citizens as "middlemen," so long as those citizens remain free to shift their loyalties elsewhere? When governments offer food stamps, are they making their citizens "middlemen" for a subsidy to the food industry? If the parents place great value on a religious education for their children, and if their enhanced options would promote the general welfare, why should we be concerned at their use of facially neutral state aid for a religious purpose?

Of course, it could be claimed that the facial neutrality is irrelevant -- in this two-school thought experiment, it can only be used for religious ends. If the students don't go to religious schools, they lose the money. But then it's worth remembering that in the real world, where there are a wide variety of private schools in even mid-size towns (and where new ones can always be built, should the need arise), the choices will rarely be this stark. In fact, even in our two-school model, there's no reason why those families that prefer secular private education couldn't band together to fund a school of their own. If the demand for such a school is insufficient, that's hardly the fault of the government, which has already done a great deal to help such plans along. (Perhaps the First Amendment concerns rely on a picture of "taking" money from the public schools and "giving" it to the religious ones. The government, however, need not produce education at all in order to provide it. Why not view a voucher policy as a general subsidy for all types of education, with government entities--i.e., the public schools--competing alongside all others who manage to stay in business? Replacing a public-only system with a general-subsidy system could always be justified on secular grounds of utility maximization.) The same analysis would apply if the town possessed no charitable institutions other than the Church; a local tax deduction for charitable contributions would not be rendered illegitimate simply because of insufficient secular demand.

Steve also points out an email by Marv Lederman, who worries that Bush's drug counseling voucher plan may "assert[] the bona fides of religious means of addressing social problems, and . . . structur[e] an aid program precisely in order to facilitate the use of such religious means." Bush, according to Lederman, claims that faith-intensive programs work well, and should be supported for that very reason. I haven't had a chance to read through the cases he cites, but my initial reaction is that such a plan is designed specifically to achieve a secular goal -- namely a reduction in drug use. Bush's argument that religious institutions are more effective for this purpose, if true, would only make it more sensible for the government to allow religiously-inclined drug addicts to seek treatment there. Why should the "instrumental value of religion," if it exists, be off-limits to the recipients of government aid?