Against Actuariocracy

I really love this point that Matt Yglesias makes:

Instead of trying harder to improve our long-run budget forecasts, what we ought to be doing is discounting long-run budget forecasts much more in our evaluation of what belongs on the policy agenda. People in Washington treat it as obvious that a CBO projection of Social Security outlays in the year 2065 is a very serious subject to talk about, but that the legality of banning genetically engineered super-sprinters from Olympic track & field events in the year 2065 is frivolous. But I’m much, much, much more certain that we’ll have genetically engineered sprinters in the future than I am about the future productivity growth rate.

I can't really speak to the pressing issue of future Olympic sprinters, but...yes!

Look, it makes sense to run long-term projections for things like Medicare and Social Security. But -- and Yglesias has made this point before -- the margin of error for those projections is going to be just huge. Maybe health care costs will crash in the future, with Dr. McCoy type treatments available at low cost, yielding long productive lives followed by a quick, quiet death from "old age"...or maybe most of us will live well past 120 but spend our last 50-75 years or more in terrible physical shape, unable to work and draining all the resources that the under-70s can produce. Or maybe we'll be pretty much like we are now, only more so. Who knows? CBO sure doesn't. Yes, it makes sense to project and pay some attention to the "like now, only more so" possibility, but if either of the others happens the policies we enact now based on that possibility won't make any sense at all in retrospect.

(That includes if the dystopian answer is our future -- if that's what's coming, it's not going to make any practical difference that our actuaries in 2011 said everything would be great in 2080. And of course if the utopian future is on its way, we're just punishing ourselves now for no good reason).

So, no, I'm not going to say that the answer is to ignore the future entirely, but for public policy planning purposes as far as I'm concerned it's real important to pay attention to the present, somewhat important to keep track of where we're heading for the next decade or so, and worth keeping an eye on anything beyond that. If you think that's shortchanging the future, then the answer isn't to pay more attention to the actuaries; the answer is to pay more attention to long-term research and development (however you believe that's best accomplished).

By the way: how much did a good medical tricorder cost in Kirk's time, and how widely available were they anyway? We're totally ahead of pace on that one, right?

BSG/DS9

I somehow missed Adam Serwer's post on Battlestar Gallactica earlier this week, but I caught up with it today...I'll be very interested to see how Serwer's reading of the series changes, or doesn't, as he continues on with it. At any rate, Serwer linked to an amazingly misguided old column by Jonah Goldberg about how Ron Moore supposedly ruined the show by, in Serwer's words, "going all LIBRUL" in season three.

Goldberg, as far as I can tell, entirely misread the series. There's no big shift where he sees one. Yes, I'm sure Ron Moore was conscious of what was going on in the real world while he put together his series (and I've only occasionally read interviews with him, so I don't know what he thinks he was doing), but as far as I can see it's just perverse to assume that the human insurgency against the Cylons he was so upset about was supposed to represent the Iraqi insurgency against the US, with Americans cast as the evil Cylons.

As it happens, I'm just a few episodes away from finishing rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which was also (at least to a large extent) a Ron Moore series. As I've said before, the two shows have a lot in common; BSG is basically, in its themes, a DS9 with much, much, better acting and without the constraints of the Star Trek universe (here's my post about the two; I also wrote a related post about Caprica). And you know what? In that series, made well before the Iraq disaster, insurgency/occupation is a major recurring theme. Indeed, the specific things that Goldberg thinks are transparently about Iraq (insurgents as good guys, imperial overlords who can't quite believe that the natives can't appreciate them) are very much present in the earlier, pre-Iraq show. One of the central characters in DS9, real white hat, is a former terrorist -- indeed, that's the word that's used to describe her.

I could say more, but apparently there's quite a history of both pro- and anti-Iraq War attempts to shoehorn BSG into supporting their views...I was late to the BSG party, and was avoiding reading much about it for a long time while I caught up, which didn't really happen until the last season, so I guess I missed the whole thing. Without delving into it, I can only say that watching DS9 along with BSG makes it highly improbably that Moore was interested in anything remotely literal about Iraq. Perhaps the fact of that war gave him an excuse to revisit old themes; more likely, in my view, it was just a case of people seeing what they wanted to see, while Moore did exactly what he wanted to and would have done regardless of outside events.

The Point of Budgeting

I highly recommend comments by Matt Yglesias on the subject of long-term budgeting:

[T]he fact that sitting around in 2010 talking about the 2080 budget is insane. After all, that’s seventy years from now. Long-term planning is nice, but it’s useless unless you have some realistic grip on the timeframe you’re talking about. 

Yglesias goes on to point out the many things that would have been invisible to anyone thinking about the 2010 budget back in 1940, and that budgeting for 2080 likewise misses such things as, he notes, the upcoming invention of the warp drive by Zephram Cochrane (this blog has a policy of always entering into blog threads discussing Star Wars or Star Trek, or Firefly for that matter, but not initiating such topics).  He's absolutely correct.

It's not always useful to compare federal budget decisions to personal or business financial decisions, but sometimes it does help.  No one taking out a mortgage really worries about the total amount he is borrowing; what matters are the monthly payments, and how they fit into current finances, with perhaps a bit of an eye towards those future changes that are very predictable.  So, for example, if interest rates drop, people can suddenly afford more expensive houses, which means borrowing more money.   No one tries to compute what they'll be able to afford 25 years into a 30 year mortgage.


Of course, and here's where a business comparison makes some sense, another question one could ask would be what the borrowing is for.  The federal budget treats all revenues and spending as essentially the same: money in, money out, end of story.  In the real world, however, there's a big difference between spending money for sodas for the break room (flat-out loss, business speaking, although that might not be the only consideration), spending to build a death star  (seems wildly inefficient to most people, but certainly would be good for generating jobs), or spending on warp drive research (low odds, perhaps, but huge financial payoff if it hits).  Anyone taking long-term budgeting as an even slightly serious proposition would be wise to think about those factors.  Or, one can much more sensibly stick to the short and medium term effects of the federal budget, which are mostly about the current costs (to the taxpayer) of borrowing, and the effects (if any) on borrowing for others.  Of course, that would leave all that rhetoric about our grandchildren having to pay back impressive-sounding amounts of money, but we've already had enough fantasy for one post.

To Boldly Go (But Not to the Right)

Yeah, it's more Star Trek blogging while waiting for the Senate to finish up.

I'm not sure if I can think of anything more foolish than a conservative attempt to claim Jean-Luc Picard as one of their own.  For those who have followed this, Kevin Drum had a great catch on this NRO post, in which conservative Mike Potemra conceded that "peace, tolerance, due process, progress" were things that conservatives actively dislike, but that Picard -- despite favoring such things -- was a good conservative hero because he's ethical.  See also, via Benen, this post by John Holbo further pointing out that Potemra's logic is entirely backwards.

Now, there's no point in taking seriously claims that only conservatives (or only liberals) are in favor of ethical behavior.  But I can add a few things.  First of all, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Captain Picard are not just fans of peace, tolerance, due process, and progress.  Picard is contemptuous of money-based economies, which he arrogantly (there's no other word for it) claims that humanity have outgrown (see "The Neutral Zone," along with any use of the Ferengi in the entire series -- the Ferengi within this series are a clearly inferior, money-obsessed people).  Second, Picard is, as far as I can tell, entirely dismissive of religion.  Religion, in the world of this Star Trek show, is nothing more than primitive superstition, and impediment to progress (which is pretty much always presented as a good thing), and impossible to take seriously beyond an anthropological curiosity.  Neither of these opinions, it seems safe to say, are conservative in any sense of the word.  Note that in both cases, the perhaps superior Deep Space Nine series is far more complex, with the Ferengi treated as essentially an equal, not an inferior, species, and religion taken far more seriously, and generally treated with respect. 


One more thing: about Picard's supposed love of France.  Picard loves his family, yes.  But he returns to France twice over the run of the series: once, when he's in full retreat from himself following his traumatic experience with the Borg, and again, when he's a doddering old man enfeebled by mental illness.  He has nothing but contempt for his brother's life, a life actually lived in the ancestral home.

The truth is that there's nothing Burkean about Jean-Luc Picard at all.  Unlike James T. Kirk, with his healthy (if a bit obsessive) suspicion of paradise, Picard's belief in progress is, as far as I can tell, undiluted.   He's no conservative.

John Bolton, There is a Multi-Legged Creature Crawling On Your Shoulder

Via Yglesias, John Bolton:

BOLTON: He says we have to acknowledge the hard truth we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. Well, no kidding. You know, homo sapiens are hard-wired for violent conflict, and we’re not going to eliminate violent conflict until homo sapiens ceases to exist as a separate species. And the whole notion you could even think about eliminating it not just in our lifetime but soon thereafter I think reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.

If you think it sounds familiar, that's because you're thinking of that great statesman, Anan-7 of Eminiar:

ANAN: There can be no peace. Don’t you see? We’ve admitted it to ourselves. We’re a killer species. It’s instinctive. It’s the same with you. Your General Order 24.

I'm sure everyone is familiar with Kirk's response:

All right. It's instinctive. The instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we not going to kill today. That's all it takes - knowing that we won't kill today.

Death, destruction, disease, horror... that's what war is all about, Anan. That's what makes it a thing to be avoided...

I don't suppose that one can cite Kirk as a necessarily winning argument...but when you start sounding like someone who was deliberately written as a cartoonishly foolish advocate of permanent war, it might be time to consider that something has gone badly wrong.

Oh, I also like Yglesias's reaction; he's no James T. Kirk, but he's pretty good, too.