A Tale of Two Betas
Given that Magic: The Gathering has been around for two decades, I have to imagine virtually everybody reading this paper has at least a passing familiarity with the popular trading card game. At a minimum, we’ve all seen one of its millions of players playing it, and those of us who actually got into the game could come up with a dozen ways to describe it. Maybe “complex,” or “deep,” or “competitive.” Personally, I’d summarize it in three words: “Expensive as hell.”
Potentially Game of the Year
There’s a feeling in the pit of my stomach when I reach the end of a really good book. It’s hard for me to describe it to another person unless they too have felt it before — it’s like emptiness, a dull pain, a longing for the story to continue. It’s a shock to the system, a natural psychological response to having the environment and characters that you’ve immersed yourself in suddenly ripped away. It’s an absolutely horrible sensation and if, in the future, I forbid my children from going to school and decide that they should remain illiterate for all of their days, you won’t have to look further than this paragraph to know my motive.
Tilting at windmills
As Washington Post staff listened to the fantastical stories being woven by Edward Snowden, our leaker du jour, I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t greet his tales with a healthy dose of skepticism. Surely the memory of Bradley Manning, the private who cried wolf, couldn’t have been distant in their minds. For all the grand claims of U.S. malfeasance that Manning made, when his stolen database of secret diplomatic cables was finally out for all to see, there was very little that appeared out of the ordinary. Now the confused youth sits in a maximum security prison, discredited among all but a few small groups that still misguidedly regard him as a cause célèbre.
Movie or game?
A couple weeks ago, Nintendo declared that it was going to enforce its copyright over third-party made “Let’s Play” videos, and began demanding ad revenue from the YouTube videos of gamers playing Nintendo games.
4X game with a one-man development team
I have something of a love-hate relationship with the 4X (eXplore/eXpand/eXploit/eXterminate) genre. The typical 4X game is an uneasy marriage of amazing strategic depth, the grandeur of empire, and tedious micromanagement. As a consequence I find myself in a cycle where I develop a desire to play a 4X game, binge for some period of time, and then quit the genre for months after getting burned out navigating menus.
Far Cry 3 is far from special
First person shooters have always been one of my favorite genres of video game. I grew up at a time when computing technology was just starting to meet the challenge of inexpensively rendering a shooter. As a kid, I was weaned on a generation of post-Doom titles, like Quake II, Counter Strike, and Team Fortress Classic, and for a time, the mere improvement of hardware was enough to keep the genre exciting. Each iteration of the first person shooter produced higher and higher graphical quality, and I didn’t spend much time lamenting that the gameplay and plot of Crysis was not many steps beyond that of Goldeneye 007.
Adapt to survive
Typically when I write a video game review, my focus is on answering the question, “Should you buy this, and if so, for how much?” This framework works fairly well for video games, but not as well for books or movies or music or the Mona Lisa. Some things you don’t review so much as you critique. You can judge a work’s creative merit, but trying to translate that merit into dollars and cents is futile.
A tale of two SimCities
When I was 10 years old, my favorite game in the world was SimCity 2000. I was fanatical about it — I spent whole weekends planning out city blocks on sheets of graphing paper and testing them to see which was the most efficient. I spent so many hours on the simulation that it’s possible it sowed the seeds of my political leanings.
Video games of 2012
The first in the eighth generation of home consoles, the Wii U made it to shelves just in time for the 2012 holiday season. Nintendo’s latest console is its first to have HD output, but there’s a slow loading time for nearly everything. The system itself is sleek, and the newest addition, the gamepad, offers a new twist on console gaming. It allows one person a different view of the TV in what Nintendo is branding as “asymmetric gameplay.” While the gamepad’s touchscreen display is crisp, the controller is uncomfortable to hold for more than a couple hours and its charge depletes quickly. Despite these setbacks, the Wii U seems promising. Only time will tell if the Wii U can find its niche with hardcore gamers, and if the system can compete with the next generation of Playstation and xbox. —JJP
Dishonored: a clever blend of action and stealth
It’s rare to come across a proper stealth game these days — by which I mean it is so rare that it’s hard to know if what I consider good stealth games are even stealth games at all. Maybe it’s the stealth genre that I dislike, and I just happen to enjoy a couple games that call themselves stealth games.
A left turn off the fiscal cliff
I can think of no easier path to a Republican resurgence than the debt solution plan put forward by that darling of the progressive left, Robert Reich. In an article for the Huffington Post, Mr. Reich outlined the following:
Old school tactics, new school graphics
One of my earliest memories as a gamer is from the age of 10, playing XCOM: Terror From The Deep (1996). I didn’t own the game — some neighbors did — but when I’d finished my chores (and sometimes when I hadn’t), I’d bike over to their house and hijack their computer for as long as was socially acceptable (and sometimes longer) to fight the alien invasion.
The Republican path forward
I’m usually skeptical of claims made by party faithfuls who, in the aftermath of losing an election, claim that no ideological adjustments are necessary to win the next election. When Kerry was defeated by Bush, I rolled my eyes as the surviving liberal rump of the Democratic Party blamed their loss on a lack of partisan purity. Similarly, I rolled my eyes when 2009 Republicans said the path forward was a return to conservative principles. To me, in both instances, the remedy for electoral losses was a simple application of median voter politics: moving toward the middle yields more victories than retreating to extremes. A bitter medicine for those who belong to those extremes, perhaps, but Hippocrates would recommend no other.
Who will win tonight’s election?
A wise man once said, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” But judging by the enormous volume of guesses made in the national print, merely making a prediction seems to take no effort at all. Bewilderingly, this election cycle has predictions that run the gamut from an imminent Romney victory, to a completely tied race, to a foregone conclusion for Obama, all made with straight faces by normally reasonable people.
Back to the grind
If you played the original Borderlands and liked it enough to do a second playthrough, there is no point in reading this review past the next sentence. Borderlands 2 is worth its cost at $60; it has everything the original has, plus a real plot and an almost seamless co-op multiplayer experience.
President Obama and the terrible, no good, very bad debate
Some of the damage done by Obama in the recent presidential debate has likely been mitigated by good numbers for current employment from the Department of Labor, but the polling still tells a dismal verdict for Obama’s performance. A strong debate for a presidential challenger normally turns around polls by about three points; Romney’s win turned around the polls by a whopping 4.6 points, turning a 3.1 deficit versus Obama into a 1.5 point lead in RealClearPolitics’ aggregation of polls. On Intrade, Romney’s odds have climbed 15 points, from 25 percent to 40 percent, while Nate Silver, who runs The New York Times’ prediction model, has Romney improving by 18.2 points, more than doubling to a 32.1 percent chance of victory.
Obama opens a lead with seven weeks to go
As little as two weeks ago, polling put the ball game between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as a tie. From Sept. 3 to Sept. 6, the RealClearPolitics average of polls put the race at an exact statistical dead heat.
Detroit: Obama’s economic blueprint for America
During his speech before the Democratic National Convention last week, Barack Obama offered a gem to rival his pledge from his 2008 campaign “moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.” In his words: “We reinvented a dying auto industry that’s back on top of the world.”
Debunking the middle class
Game theory suggests that in the final sum of things, democratic politics is mostly about wooing the median voter, i.e. the individual or demographic whose inclusion will bring your coalition to 50.1 percent of the vote. Thus it comes as no surprise that in America, where the median voter is a middle-class voter, election-year rhetoric tends to focus on fetishizing those of moderate income.
The Ryan bump
On August 11, Mitt Romney announced Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate. The choice of Ryan seems to have outperformed expectations.
Rape exception for abortion laws?
Recently, while discussing his views on abortion, Todd Akin, a Republican representative from Missouri and challenger for incumbent Claire McCaskill’s senate seat, commented that pregnancy from rape is very rare, because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Vehicles for everyone
Ah, late summer, when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of actually playing one of the dozens of games he purchased during the Steam summer sale. The Valve Corporation’s talent for making PC gamers buy more games than they can ever hope to play is a thing of legend, and this year I once again found myself in its thrall.
The short list
As the fierce battles of the presidential primaries fade into history, the attentions of politicos turn to three questions: Who will win the 2012 presidential race? What electoral strategies will be employed? And who will Mitt Romney pick for his running mate?
Good riddance, Alcator C-Mod
No one likes to hear that their work is a waste of time and money. But the job of government is not to assuage the egos of research scientists — the public welfare, writ large, comes first. In a guest column last week, Derek Sutherland ’12 bemoaned a proposed cut to state funding of the Alcator C-Mod reactor at MIT. I’m sorry Derek, but it needed to be said: your research was not worthy of the public’s money, and to be frank, was also not worth your time and attention as a researcher.
Sound and fury, signifying nothing
In his brief campaign for the presidency, Rick Perry uttered quite a bit of nonsense. Between the numerous debate gaffes, the self-contradiction of his hard-money populism, and, in his desperate endgame, the obscene groping for the support of social conservatives, Texas Rick was an inestimable source of I-winced-so-hard-I-laughed-style humor. I thought he was just as entertaining as Steve Carell’s character on The Office…so long as I could avoid stumbling over a grim reminder that Mr. Perry was running for real-life leader of the free world, not running a paper company in an NBC sitcom.
$1 billion for a dictator
War is never a clean affair. The recent action in Libya is no exception — in victory, the rebels have taken to killing pro-Gaddafi forces in retribution, including, it appears, Gaddafi himself, who was captured while fleeing his final holdout in Sirte. But the final outcome is as pure and as cheap a victory as the United States can hope to force on the modern battlefield. The Department of Defense estimates that from March to September, the Libyan intervention cost the DOD a mere $1.1 billion, with no U.S. casualties.
Looking for a story? Bastion delivers.
To me, the hallmark of a good work of fiction is the feeling of emptiness I feel when I complete it. Being severed from a well-constructed fantasy should induce a moment of existential panic in even the most stoic of men. By that metric, Bastion, a video game from Supergiant Games currently on offer for a mere $15, has one of the best stories I’ve encountered in at least a year.
VIDEO GAME REVIEW Adventurers, look out
As a conservative, I’m always a little bit wary when it comes to video game storytelling. Game development studios, if you ask me, have a decidedly liberal bias. Whether the game is BioShock, with its aggressive assault on the ideology of Ayn Rand, or Grand Theft Auto IV, with its skeptical look at the American dream, I worry that somewhere out there, sneaky left-wingers are using my recreational time to brainwash me in their ways.
Romney is the nominee
In October, State of the Race declared Mitt Romney the heavy favorite to become the Republican 2012 candidate for president of the United States. Since then, much has changed in the Republican field, but the most important change is this: Mitt Romney is no longer the heavy favorite to become the Republican nominee; he is the prohibitive favorite. His polling numbers against other candidates, his polling numbers against Obama, his institutional support, his campaign funding, his superior organization, his wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the political positioning and messaging of his campaign have given him a virtual lock on the nomination.
Cambridge’s meat Mecca
I’m not bigoted against vegetarians. On the contrary, I have many vegetarian friends. I talk and joke and laugh with them as if they were real people. I am a big enough person to tolerate them, even if they have not been enlightened by that most divine truth: the Maillard reaction is proof that God loves us and wants us to eat meat.
Did Fukushima kill the nuclear renaissance No, that renaissance died right here at home
In the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, many wondered what the event’s impact would be on the nuclear renaissance in the United States. Those who follow the nuclear industry didn’t need eight months of hindsight to give an answer: what nuclear renaissance?
$1 billion for a dictator
War is never a clean affair. The recent action in Libya is no exception — in victory, the rebels have taken to killing pro-Gaddafi forces in retribution, including, it appears, Gaddafi himself, who was captured while fleeing his final holdout in Sirte. But the final outcome is as pure and as cheap a victory as the United States can hope to force on the modern battlefield. The Department of Defense estimates that from March to September, the Libyan intervention cost the DOD a mere $1.1 billion, with no U.S. casualties.
Debt and diplomacy
It’s challenging to get either Americans or policy wonks excited about the European debt crisis. Foreign countries are having problems to which there are no clever policy solutions? I’d rather listen to a panel discussion of Mitt Romney’s hair.
STATE OF THE RACE Romney will face Obama, Republicans might take Senate
With 70 days remaining until the Iowa caucus, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is the heavy favorite to become the Republican presidential nominee. Leading in the polls and viewed by many within the party as the sole remaining credible candidate, it is unsurprising that Romney is being given a 70 percent chance of taking the nomination by Intrade, a leading prediction market.
GETTING OUT OF THE RED YouTuber go home
Between January 2008 and January 2010, the U.S. private sector shed 9.8 percent of its workforce, either through layoffs or reduction of employee hours. One might have expected the output of the private sector to have declined during the same period, but no — Real Gross Domestic Product remained essentially the same.
GETTING OUT OF THE RED Less red with more green
Earlier this year, the Inter-Agency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon, a panel assembled for the purpose of estimating the harm that a ton of CO2 emissions causes to the world, concluded its efforts to put a price tag on greenhouse gas emissions. Using up-to-date scientific assessments and an appropriate time discounting of future harms, the working group concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal bodies should use $21 as the baseline estimate of the damage caused by releasing a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Government is a crappy venture capitalist
Solyndra deserves more credit than the media is giving it. But not much.
A state of their own
Palestine’s bid to become a voting member at the United Nations is nearing its final hour. In the latest tally, it appears that Palestine is close to securing nine votes on the Security Council, with Brazil, China, India, Lebanon, Russia, and South Africa voting yes; Bosnia, Gabon, and Nigeria very likely to vote yes; and Britain, Colombia, France, Germany, and Portugal set to abstain from the vote. Should Palestine reach the nine-vote threshold for entry, the United States will be faced with a choice. Should it abstain, and defer to the Security Council super majority, or should it vote no and veto the Palestinian entry?
Lies, damned lies, and presidential reduction plans
During the debt ceiling negotiations, President Obama made an offer to Speaker of the House John Boehner that was the epitome of reasonable:: in return for lifting the debt ceiling, Obama proposed a $4 trillion reduction in federal deficits over ten years, split roughly 2-to-1 between spending cuts and revenue increases, with little to none of the cuts occurring in the next two years. Boehner, having waited for this sort of middle-of-the-road compromise for weeks, quickly accepted. And for a moment, I thought it was all going to work out.
Turning to the Haqqanis, Pakistan has made its choice
A pitfall of writing for this newspaper as frequently as I do is that sometimes a major event comes along and I find that I’ve already said most of what I wish to say. Such is the case with Admiral Michael G. Mullen’s recent admonishment of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence for its ties to the Haqqani insurgent network.
Elizabeth Warren misses the point
In August, Elizabeth Warren, the presumptive Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Scott Brown, had this to say:
GETTING OUT OF THE RED Buying houses with other people’s money
For decades, the U.S. government has attempted to encourage home ownership through a tax provision called the home mortgage interest rate deduction (HMID). Formed in an era before politicians began christening each of their creations in Orwellian NewSpeak, the HMID does exactly what its moniker suggests: for those taxpayers who itemize, the HMID allows any interest payments on a home mortgage to be deducted from their taxable income.
No national infrastructure investment bank
Last week, President Obama unveiled a $447 billion spending plan. Notice I say “spending plan,” rather than “stimulus plan” or “jobs plan,” because there is a difference. None of the plan’s components, which consist of roughly $250 billion in payroll tax cuts, $60 billion in unemployment insurance, and $140 billion to fund infrastructure (most of it going to a national infrastructure investment bank), can be considered significantly stimulative, and without stimulus, we’re unlikely to see many new jobs.
THE CONVERSATION Rick Perry: A Texas miracle?
As Rick Perry basks in his front-runner status, the national conversation is turning to the topic of Texas. Assuming Perry does indeed secure the Republican nomination, here is the discussion you can expect to hear up until election day:
The anti-stimulus argument
In 1965, Milton Friedman, the scion of right-wing economics, famously declared, “We are all Keynesians now.” If he were alive today, Friedman might add, “And we are all Keynesians still.” The view of mainstream economics (and myself) is that the United States is suffering from a lack of aggregate demand, and the solution to our economic woes is economic stimulus, i.e., some combination of tax cuts, government spending, and an expansion of our monetary supply.
Doctrineless and self-absorbed
The decennial of the greatest terrorist attack against the United States is an occasion packed with retrospection and reflection. Every news network and publication is offering its two cents on what the U.S. did, what it should have done, and where it should go in the future. Normally, I might complain about the artificiality of it all — shouldn’t we take stock of matters near actual watershed moments rather than a random anniversary? But September 11, 2011, strikes me as a well-placed time for self-assessment — with bin Laden dead, Qaddafi in exile, and our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan coming to a conclusion, we may well be looking at an inflection point in our foreign affairs.
Nonsense, followed by begging
Frequent readers of this paper may recall a piece by MIT President Susan J. Hockfield and Harvard President Drew G. Faust in the Boston Globe, titled “Riding the Innovation Wave,” and this columnist’s negative response, “Voodoo Innovationomics.” Well, last Monday, President Hockfield was at it again, this time with a solo piece in the New York Times titled, “Manufacturing a Recovery.”
GETTING OUT OF THE RED The crisis in disability insurance
Social Security is primarily made of three insurance programs: old age insurance, insurance against on-the-job injuries (workers compensation), and insurance against career-ending disabilities (disability insurance). Old age insurance, being the bulk of Social Security, is what comes up in conversation most often. But the remainder of Social Security is in dire need of reform as well, and if Congress paid a little more attention to Disability Insurance (DI) in particular, they might go a considerable way toward fixing the nation’s budget deficit.
GETTING OUT OF THE RED The 1.5 MRC Force
In the parlance of military planning, the U.S. wields what one would call a “two-MRC force.” That is to say, as structured, the armed forces should be able to fight two “major regional conflicts” (Iraq-sized wars), simultaneously. The logic behind this sizing is simple: should the U.S. choose to fight in one region (say, the Korean peninsula), it doesn’t want to find itself without a free hand in dealing with other regions (say, the Persian gulf). Two MRC’s worth of military might gives the U.S. the strength to conduct big stick diplomacy with troublemakers even while taking action against another rogue state.
Keynesian quandaries: The debt deal aftermath
The Stewart-Colbert rally was a good bit of entertainment in and of itself, but the best bit of comedy to come out of it was a video made by a pair of faux reporters who went about asking the rally-goers “Is Barack Obama a Keynesian?” The attendees, unaware of John Maynard Keynes and his contribution to modern macroeconomics, confused Keynesian for Kenyan; hilarity ensued.
Capitalize smarter, not harder
Suppose for a moment that there are two farmers, Jim and Bob. Jim grows tomatoes, and Bob grows corn. Both crops take tractors to produce. Normally, corn and tomatoes are equally profitable, but this year, corn is expected to be 15 percent more profitable than tomatoes. Accordingly, Jim would like to loan out his tractors to a corn farmer and split the extra profits, while Bob is looking to borrow some tractors from someone else.
Good job ending bias toward heterosexuals…
A central tenet of all true libertarianism is that individuals, not the state, are the final arbiters of morality. The role of the state as a promoter of moral behavior exists only as a corollary to its monopoly on force or its role as a coordinator of collective action, i.e., the state exists to prevent a man from imposing his will upon another through violence or theft, and to broker an agreement when decisions cannot be made at the individual level. To extend the law beyond that is to make the state a conduit for the very impositions that it was built to defend against. It is a subversion of free society.
Toss the bums out
If there is one conclusion to be drawn from half a century of studying the American educational system, it is this: throwing more money at the problem will not solve anything. According to the Department of Education, between 1960 and 2000, the pupil-teacher ratio fell from 25.8 to 16.0, the percent of teachers with masters degrees or higher went from 23.5 to 56.2, and the real amount spent per pupil went from $2,235 to $7,591 in 2000 dollars. What did we get for all that money? Reading and math achievement stayed the same, while science results actually fell. In 2003, our spending per pupil was five times that of Poland, but we actually achieved worse results on the international PISA tests.
Mission Accomplished
In the aftermath of the U.S’s successful strike in Abbottabad, much attention has been given to what Osama bin Laden’s death means for the war on terror. Was bin Laden still an operational leader within al-Qaida, and if so, how much does his death hamper the group’s ability to conduct terrorism? Will jihadists still be able to recruit, fundraise, and coalesce under a single banner without their premier standard-bearer? How much safer is the United States with the world’s number one mass-killer moldering at the bottom of the ocean?
Keep the Bush tax cuts
Deadweight loss triangles are a tough concept to explain to laymen. They require discussions of marginal cost and benefit, of incidences and elasticities, and of Pareto optimalities. Perhaps that’s why, in the 10 years since passage, the mainstream media has altogether forgotten the reasonable motivations behind the Bush tax cuts and substituted a narrative of its own. Today the airwaves are filled with serious men touting the ridiculous notion that the Republicans passed the tax cuts in order to give money to their favorite class, the ultra-wealthy.
It’s good to be king
In 1999, the Committee on Women Faculty at MIT released a report claiming that there was significant gender bias at MIT. Women made up a minority of the Institute’s professorship, and on average were paid less and allotted less lab space; the report alleged this was due to a “subtle but pervasive bias” against women at the Institute. In response, the administration began a concerted effort to recruit more women and increase the pay of female professors. They succeeded, though at the cost of convincing many that women were being given an unfair advantage.
Time to put government hands on Medicare
Two weeks ago, Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the chairman of the House Budget Committee, issued a CBO-scored budget proposal that is being called the “Path to Prosperity.” The budget, a first of its kind — a unique, comprehensive fix to our debt problem — has caught many in the political establishment flat-footed. This includes President Obama (whose own budget plan looks prodigal in comparison) as well as many Republican leaders who have thought it politically wise to advocate for spending cuts without enumerating what, specifically, should be cut.
MIT is no rest, no mercy, no matter what
I know you, for I have seen you dozens of times before. You think you want to be a scientist or an engineer. But be realistic — what do you, a teenager, know of science and engineering? You have applied to this institution, not out of any sophisticated understanding of the choices you are making, but because society has sold you a lifestyle brand. You want to be able to call yourself a scientist for the same reasons trendy youths want to buy clothes with swooshes or cigarettes with cowboy mascots. You crave, as any human does, the respect and admiration of your peers. You see the status that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have achieved, and hope that a career in technology will be your salvation. But you will find none here.
The Good, the Bad, and the Strange Wars
Back in February 2009, I wrote a piece for this newspaper asking President Obama to take a moment and decide whether he was an idealist or a realist in the world of foreign policy. Failure to answer this question, I warned, would lead him into many of the situations his predecessor had found himself in.
The Guantanamo Bay camps must remain open
Forget for a moment all of the legal exegesis of whether or not the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are prisoners of war (subject to indefinite detention and military tribunals), civilians (subject to the court system of the United States), or “unlawful combatants” (constituting a newly defined class of suspects). A legal system is, at its core, a decision-maker, determining whether alleged criminals are innocent or guilty. Like any other imperfect decision-maker, the system has two types of error: Type I error (deciding a person is guilty when they are innocent), and Type II error (deciding a person is innocent when they are guilty). For a legal system with a given degree of accuracy, we can trade-off between the two types of error, reducing Type I at the expense of increasing Type II, or vice-versa.
The Guantanamo Bay camps must be reformed
In his defense of Guantanamo Bay (and of our detention policy in general), Yost makes a fair point — our legal system, at its core, is a decision-making system with Type I and Type II errors, and the Guantanamo Bay detainees form a category of suspects that do not appropriately fit into either of our existing legal pathways.
The Guantanamo Bay camps must be closed
Let us begin with one obvious fact: the decision to establish detention camps at Guantanamo Bay has cost us much more than we have gained.
Voodoo Innovationomics
First Solar, an American company, makes the best solar cells on the face of the planet. Their devices, while still an eternity away from being cost-competitive with conventional sources of power, are staggeringly far ahead of the rest of the photovoltaic field. The reason for their considerable lead is an innovative new technology for harnessing photons, using cadmium telluride (CdTe) in lieu of traditional crystalline silicon. Theirs is a story of American ingenuity and inventiveness. It is also a story about how we will not “win the future” through innovation.
The back of the envelope
In the last issue of The Tech, I tried to explain the events at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant and gave my opinion, as someone with two nuclear engineering degrees from MIT, as to what I thought the situation on the ground was and the likely course of events. In particular, I made three important claims:
What happened at the Fukushima reactor?
As a nuclear engineer, it is depressing to read the recent reports on the Fukushima nuclear incident — not because of the incident itself (at this point I strongly believe that we will remember Fukushima as evidence of how safe nuclear power is when done right) — but because the media coverage of the event has been rife with errors so glaring that I have to wonder if anyone in the world of journalism has ever taken a physics class. My favorite: in one article, boric acid was described as a “nutrient absorber” instead of a “neutron absorber.” How many editors signed off on that line without asking, “Why would a nuclear reactor need to absorb nutrients?”
Libya: A foreign policy no-brainer
For a people who have been under the thumb of a dictator for over four decades, Libyans sure do make up for lost time. In the course of just a couple weeks, the rebels in Libya have done much to end Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year rule. They have gained effective control, in terms of area, of most of the country, leaving the old regime buttoned up in Tripoli and a few surrounding areas.
Mitch Daniels for president
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is not typically a place where speakers challenge their audiences. CPAC is a three-day pep rally, a conservative Woodstock, a forum for, as Ronald Reagan once said during a speech there, “dancing with them who brung you.” It is a celebration of conservatism, rather than a serious reflection on its future. A slick politician would take the opportunity to pander to the army of conservative organizers and activists that populate the conference, rather than delivering Cassandra-like predictions.
Word association
A friend once complained to me that she couldn’t trust Republicans. Paraphrasing her words: “You see them in interviews on cable news and it’s uncanny — they’re all using the exact same phrase to describe a situation. Every hour, on the hour, you’ve got a right-wing talking head repeating the line of the day, and I can’t help but think that there’s some secret board of shadowy figures, passing out memos to conservatives that tell them what they’ll be saying.”
Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t change
Let’s start with one basic, almost indisputable fact: the likely effect of repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) will be to make our military weaker. Judging by the recent survey of servicemen, the Marine Corps will suffer the greatest impact: of those marines who say they’ve actually served with a homosexual leader, co-worker, or subordinate, they reported that in 28 percent of instances it worsened their unit’s ability to work together, in 26 percent it reduced unit morale, and in 25 percent it harmed the unit’s performance. Virtually no Marines reported that having an effectively open homosexual in their immediate unit had a positive effect.
The battle for Wisconsin’s soul
Paul R. Krugman PhD ’77’s recent article “Wisconsin Power Play” in the New York Times is a revealing look into the liberal derangement over the ongoing public sector union battle in the Badger State. In his article, our esteemed alumnus claims that unions must be defended because they are a bastion against undemocratic forces. And against what undemocratic forces are they arrayed? The Republicans, of course. And how do we know that Republicans are, as Krugman says, trying to turn America into a “third-world-style oligarchy?” Because they oppose unions.
The inequality illusion
Benjamin Disraeli is once said to have remarked that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. As a man who views the world through empiricist lenses, I’ve never been fond of the saying (I prefer to think of the three categories as lies, damned lies, and personal anecdotes), but there is some truth to the maxim. Statistics, arranged with malice aforethought, can lead their viewers to make facile, incorrect inferences.
Grabbing the third rail
Last year, the Social Security Trust Fund paid out more than it received in tax revenue. By 2039, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the trust fund will be exhausted, at which point either benefits will have to be cut by 20 percent or taxes increased by 25 percent.
Freedom on the march
For the past four years, Fukuyama-style neoconservatives such as myself have grimly born witness as, around the world, the lights of liberty and freedom grew dim or were snuffed out. Bush, chastened by his failed Social Security reform, Hurricane Katrina, and a midterm defeat, gave up his freedom agenda. Obama, more eager to extend an open hand to dictators than wrest them from power, similarly demurred. And so we stood by, outraged but helpless, as Hugo Chavez solidified his dictatorship in Venezuela; as Cuba’s despotism positioned itself to outlive its founder; as Russia backslid into authoritarianism; as much of Eastern Europe began its descent into autocracy; as Bush’s mismanagement of Iraq and Obama’s incomprehensible tolerance for election rigging in Afghanistan dashed our hopes for democratic reform; as the toeholds of Arab liberty in Lebanon and Palestine grew more tenuous; as Iran brutally suppressed the democratic urges of its people; and as Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mauritania, Niger, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Burundi, and Sri Lanka, amid recession and instability, became significantly less free.
Health care repeal is a terrible, terrible idea
Last week, in a 47-51 vote, the U.S. Senate rejected an amendment to the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act. Sadly, this vote will not end the Republican push to repeal ObamaCare. Going forward, Republicans are mounting a two-pronged assault on the health care reform’s individual insurance mandate before it comes into force in 2014. The first line of attack is to challenge the law in court, arguing that compelling all citizens to purchase health insurance is an unconstitutional overstep of the federal government’s powers. The second is to de-fund the agencies tasked with policing the mandate, which amounts to a de facto repeal.
It’s a MAD World
Imagine two men, John and Nick, standing at the edge of a precipice. They are chained together at the ankle by a heavy chain such that if one falls over the edge (or throws himself off the edge), the other will fall with him, and both will die. John is trying to coerce Nick into giving him something — for convenience, let’s call it a MacGuffin. John has the strength to throw Nick off the cliff, but does not have the strength to simply seize the MacGuffin from Nick — he can only have it if it is willingly given away. Let us also imagine that John values the MacGuffin more than Nick does.
Cairo is burning
It is the eleventh straight day of protests in Egypt, and nearly every day has been marked by fierce and violent clashes between protesters and riot police. The president, Hosni Mubarak, an 82-year old autocrat, has only avoided the fate of his Tunisian counterpart by sacking his entire government and scheduling elections for September, at which point he claims he will step down. Given the mercurial nature of revolutions, and of Arab revolutions in particular, anything is possible — but for now, the Egyptian regime seems set to end with a whimper, not a bang.
Living in a housing-constrained world
To the members of the student body who do not follow campus issues, there are only two facts you need to be aware of to have an above-average understanding of what is going on:
The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
The city was strange and the society was unnerving, but what disturbed me most about my Dubai experience was my job as a business consultant for the Boston Consulting Group.
Can we make government more efficient?
As the U.S. Congress (belatedly) hammers out this year’s federal budget, our politicians and pundits have focused their attention on three questions. First, how important are the activities that government performs relative to the private enterprise that it supplants? Second, how redistributionary should our system of taxes and spending be, both in terms of how much we take from the rich to give to the poor, as well as how much we take from future generations to give to the present? And finally, which presents the greater risk: a failure to provide Keynesian stimulus today, or a potential debt crisis tomorrow?
Republicans need a fresh candidate to do well in 2012
Intrade.com is an online prediction market that tracks, among other things, U.S. politics. In the aftermath of a bruising defeat of Congressional Democrats, Intrade predicts more of the same in 2012. The market currently gives Republicans a 3 in 5 chance of retaining control of their newly acquired House, and roughly a 2 in 3 chance of taking or tying the Senate.
Ms. Hockfield, tear down this wall
The past few years are not a fluke: a four-year MIT education is in high demand. From 2004 to 2010, the number of applicants to MIT’s undergraduate program has gone up 48.5 percent, from 10,549 to 15,663, and early application numbers suggest this year will reveal a further 7-8 percent increase. This is not merely a matter of students applying to more colleges — the matriculation rate of admitted students has gone up, not down, from 58.7 percent to 64.6 percent.
Add India to a revamped Security Council
On Nov. 8, on the final day of his visit to India, President Obama gave an address to a joint session of the Indian parliament that included this gem: “In the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed United Nations Security Council that includes India as a permanent member.”
Being liberal doesn’t work — to remain relevant, Democrats must revise their agenda
There’s an interesting fairy tale that Democrats (and Mr. Veldman) have been telling themselves for more than a decade. “If we were simply better at getting out our message, we’d win more elections.” This is an incredibly facile analysis — it is akin to saying that the U.S. Army would win more wars if its soldiers shot more enemies and got shot less themselves. Even if it had the power to explain why Democrats win in some years and lose in others (which it doesn’t), it’s less than worthless as a form of strategic advice. The “voters are stupid, why else wouldn’t they vote for us” meme has been rampant on the left for quite some time — if it really had insights to offer, surely these lessons would have been capitalized upon by now.
Bowles-Simpson deficit report surprisingly useful
On February 18, President Obama created the “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” a bipartisan 18-member panel of senators, representatives, and other luminaries. Co-chaired by Erksine Bowles (a former Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton) and Alan Simpson (a former Republican senator) the commission was charged with “identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run… including changes to address the growth of entitlement spending.”
The nihilism of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange compromises U.S. security
In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Julian Assange, the director of WikiLeaks, was asked if he would ever refrain from releasing information he knew might get someone killed. The question was not just hypothetical: a year and a half earlier, Assange had published a study that detailed technical vulnerabilities in actively employed U.S. Army countermeasures against improvised explosive devices.
Junior varsity terrorism
On October 27th, two packages, each containing a Hewlett-Packard printer with plastic explosive hidden in the toner cartridge, were sent to Chicago, Illinois from FedEx and UPS offices in Sana’a, Yemen. The packages were intended to explode inside planes mid-air over U.S. soil. Instead, authorities were alerted to the bombs (likely by an active double agent within al-Qaeda), and two days later, both bombs were defused.
Ratify START
On April 8, 2010, Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, prompted by the expiry (and coming expiry) of previous nuclear weapons treaties, signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or “New START” for short. If ratified, New START will bind the U.S. and Russia to three important limits on strategic nuclear weapons for a duration of ten years:
Of cars and ditches
There’s a story Obama liked to tell on the campaign trail: Republicans drive a car into a ditch, and then hand the keys to Democrats. Democrats work and work to get the car out of the ditch while Republicans sun themselves. Then, once Democrats finally get the car out of the ditch, there’s a tap on their shoulder: it’s the Republicans, and they want the keys back. The car is the economy. Or the nation. And there are Slurpees involved, I think. But the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t give the car keys to Republicans, else they’ll run us all into a ditch.
The banana-equivalent dose
Terrorists are stubborn creatures. Even as we leave soft targets across the U.S. unguarded, they continue to target airplanes. It’s an obsession, and appropriately, we’ve dedicated considerable resources to detecting and defeating just these types of attacks.
Cash crop
Serious discussions of fiscal reform are usually dominated by the big ticket items: health care spending, Social Security, and taxes. This is sensible — these are the areas responsible for the vast majority of our budget shortfall. But the efficiency losses from these programs are small relative to their size. When we debate them, we are rightfully concerned over the drag they create on our nation’s productivity through disincentives to work. But the broader question, the one that makes reform difficult, is one of wealth redistribution: How much will we borrow from future generations to finance present consumption, and how much will we take from the rich to give to the poor?
Strikeout in Seoul
The moment was ripe with promise. China, after years of careful diplomacy and a burnishing of its image as a gentle giant, had spent the past year bullying its neighbors in territorial disputes and rattling its saber over territorial waters. Pakistan had proved itself an incapable ally in the war on terror, and a re-alignment in Central Asia was needed. North Korea had grown erratic, and a conference with regional allies was needed to determine what should be done. This was a moment of great potential, an opportunity for the U.S. to position itself as a power broker and balancer in the Pacific, to court India as a hedge against Chinese power and promoter of stability in the region, to draw contingency plans with South Korea, and to create the institutions and ties that would solidify a lasting American influence.
Derail high speed rail
We all have policy crushes. For Republicans it’s ending earmarks — you can point out a million times how inconsequential earmarks are in the grand scheme of the federal budget, but if your audience is John Boehner or Tom Coburn, you might as well be speaking to a wall. For myself, it’s nuclear power — so what if natural gas is currently so cheap that nuclear has no practical hope of being economical? It’s the principle of the thing, and the principle of nuclear power is that it’s the sexiest way of generating electric charges ever conceived by man.
Don’t vote!
Your vote doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. You can do the math yourself — imagine a close House race in which each voter has a 51 percent chance of voting for one candidate, 49 percent for another, and around 300,000 voters are expected to turn out. What are the chances that the marginal vote matters, i.e. without your input, the race would split exactly 150,000 to 150,000?
Abortion: A question of values
I don’t like writing about social issues. In part, this is because they seem so insignificant. Why should I care about the passage or overturning of Prop 8 (a gay marriage ban in California) when that state already offers domestic partnerships that provide all the same rights as marriage? Does it really matter whether a violent criminal spends his entire life behind bars or is put to death? How can the issue of marijuana legalization rate more highly in anyone’s mind when Social Security is insolvent?
Foolish and common
In this Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, Paul Krugman PhD ’77 has written a little piece called “Rare and Foolish.” In it, Krugman laments the concentration of rare earths mining industry in China, saying it has given them extraordinary leverage over other nations, and lambasts U.S. leaders (particularly Bush) for letting the industry slip away into foreign hands.
Now or never
The Republicans are going to take back the House of Representatives. With a little luck, and some defections by moderate Democrats (both “R-Nelson” and “R-Lieberman” have a certain <i>je ne sais quoi</i> about them), they could assume control of the Senate as well.
Dr. Keynes-love
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past year (better luck next time with that mortgage), this should come as no surprise: The recovery is not going well. The stimulus bill, passed at the start of 2009, failed to bring the economic growth and employment predicted by its architects. Unemployment is higher than the White House projected it would be <i>without</i> the stimulus, suggesting, in the ultimate of political embarrassments, that the administration’s own numbers prove their policies have been counter-productive.
Global warming not worth the fight
Global warming is real. It is predominantly anthropogenic. Left unchecked, it will likely warm the earth by 3-7 C by the end of the century. What should the United States do about it?
Red state rising
In the 1990’s, Christine O’Donnell dismissed evolution as “just a theory,” and compared masturbation to adultery. More recently, she claimed scientists “are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains,” and said China was plotting to take over the United States. She has lied about her education, misused campaign contributions, and has a history of tax problems. She is an incompetent reprobate with a world view that is as simplistic as it is atavistic. She is the 2010 Republican candidate for Delaware’s open senate seat.
‘You guys made the cyber world look like the north German plain’
The pundits have called it a superweapon, a guided missile, and the herald of a new age in warfare. It’s a computer worm called Stuxnet... and they’re right.
Caught in a death spiral
When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the moniker that D.C’s word doctors chose for the health care reform bill) was debated in Congress, many of its proponents described the main components of the bill — an individual insurance mandate, guaranteed issue provisions that prevent exclusion based on pre-existing conditions, and subsidies for poorer citizens — as a three-legged stool. Remove just one of the legs, they explained to colleagues looking to reduce the scope of reform, and the whole thing would fall down.
Spinning away
The past twelve months have not been good for Iran. Domestically, the country still roils from the electoral chicanery of the previous August. Internationally, the United Nations has placed fresh sanctions on the regime for failing to comply with its resolutions. Economically, it seems recession has hit the nation, though it is hard to be certain — the government has ceased releasing numbers entirely.
Net neutrality is a broken concept
Suppose the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stood up one day and declared, under a law written 76 years ago, it has the authority to regulate the delivery of newspapers. Shortly after making this proclamation, the FCC chairman announces he has decided how newspaper delivery will be regulated — rather than letting the use of our finite news transportation supply be prioritized by competitive, free market bidding, he will instead institute a one-size-fits-all rule: Delivery companies must deliver the news in the order it is received and charge all customers an equal price. The chairman calls his model “Newspaper Boy Neutrality.”
While Karachi slowly burns
In the game of geopolitics, Pakistan was dealt a terrible hand. It began its existence situated next to an aggressive and mortal enemy who, both in population as well as gross domestic product, outnumbered it by more than three to one.
Leaving our children behind
<i>“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works... Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”</i>
Build the NYC mosque
On August 3, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Society voted unanimously not to extend landmark status to 45–47 Park Place, formerly a Burlington Coat Factory, now a partially-damaged warehouse. As far as municipal law goes, the decision was as mundane and routine as handing out a parking ticket or issuing a liquor license — the warehouse, with its commonplace architectural style, simply did not offer a compelling justification for landmark status. And yet to hear many conservatives talk about the matter, it seems as if the Landmarks Preservation Society has dealt a death blow to the American way of life. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich claims that it will “encourage [radical Islamists] in their challenge to our civilization,” and Arizona Senator Jon Kyl writes that it will “risk giving militant Islamists a victory to exploit.”
Muhammad in a bear costume
On November 2, 2004, Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film director, author, and father, was shot and killed by Mohammed Bouyeri as van Gogh rode his bicycle to work. In the open air of the streets of Amsterdam, Bouyeri shot van Gogh eight times, attempted to decapitate him, and then finished by stabbing two knives into his chest, pinning there a 5-page manifesto threatening the lives of others, including a prominent Dutch politician.
Where will you go from here?
In 1970, an American agronomist named Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize. His research on improving crop yields, a central component to what is commonly called the “Green Revolution,” has been credited with saving as many as a billion lives. If this estimate is an exaggeration, it is not a large one — at the time of Borlaug’s effort, the conventional wisdom of pundits, epitomized by Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb,” was that without significant population control, mankind was on its way to mass starvation. Though he achieved little fame or monetary reward, Borlaug may be the greatest humanitarian of all time.
Should we cut NASA funding?
The White House has announced plans to host a conference in Florida on April 15 during which President Obama will unveil his vision for the U.S. space program. If recent moves by the administration are any indication, this new vision will significantly curtail public funding for space activity. The president is working hard to spin the upcoming change as a transition rather than a cut, and perhaps for good reason: He is unlikely to find a receptive audience in Florida, long a recipient of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s largess.
The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell
The city was strange and the society was unnerving, but what disturbed me most about my Dubai experience was my job as a business consultant for the Boston Consulting Group.
Debunking the Obama trade policy
In the previous article, I tried to explain the core logic behind why trade is mutually beneficial, and not a “competition” as the Obama Administration has been describing it. At some level, many non-economists seem to accept the argument I offered, but retain some lingering doubt. They concede that free trade is beneficial (or is at least necessary to avoid some greater loss) but they still cannot shake the feeling that trade must have winners and losers. After all, isn’t our growing trade deficit with China evidence that we are being “beaten?”
In defense of Dodd
Though byzantine on paper, at its heart, the Senate financial reform bill of Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) is sweet and simple. We will expand the resolution authority of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation so that it will be able to do more than simply place small-to-mid-sized banks in federal receivership.
The false dichotomy
For politicians, depicting the conflict between right and left as a matter of markets vs. governments is convenient. It allows liberals to portray their opponents as anarcho-capitalists who believe that the fire department should be privatized, and lets conservatives pretend their rivals want the government to make every medical decision for its people. So long as this either-or binary paradigm is accepted by the voters, politicians don’t need an intellect capable of explaining difficult and nuanced policy trade-offs — instead they simply need the money to run ad campaigns reminding voters of the past successes and failures of governments or markets.
Mr. Obama, tear down this wall
It is popular wisdom that immigrants are a drain upon our country. They’re stereotyped as either violent criminals, diseased, or wards of the state. We’re told that they steal American jobs, put a strain on our natural resources, and fail to integrate into our society. As immigration reform begins working its way through Congress, (and as Arizona goes insane), it is important to set the record straight and review the reasons why expanding legal immigration is in the interests of the United States.
The real danger of Chinese “competition”
It has been common for economists to tolerate the blather of competitiveness, not only because there are practical difficulties with trying to educate non-economists on comparative advantage and the mechanics of free markets, but also because it is commonly believed that such rhetoric can be harnessed in support of good policies. If I am worried about the large negative externalities posed by global warming, and believe it is in the U.S. or the world’s best interest for America to invest in public energy research, then what harm is there if others believe that such expenditures are necessary to “win” against China?
Dispatches from the collapse
It is tempting to blame consultants and their ilk for the troubles that Dubai faces today. Surely, if my experience was at all typical, Western consulting firms are derelict in their duty as advisers to the United Arab Emirates. But I would argue that consultants are a product of their surroundings, not the other way around. Prior to the recent meltdown, which had commentators everywhere wondering if Dubai would destroy the fragile recovery that the banking sector has eked out, Boston Consulting Group’s top brass was extolling the virtues of the Middle East and the stability it would provide to the world’s financial markets. And why not? Every recommendation that encourages more expenditures by clients offers up greater opportunity for future cases. If Dubai’s companies lack the internal resources or motivation to poke the conclusions made by their rented consultants, if they reward optimism and penalize pessimism, they should not be surprised when they receive cheery, but flimsy advice.
Welcome to your caste
I settled in a studio apartment on the thirteenth floor of an apartment complex in a western, unfinished area of the city. It was simple but spacious, and despite my zeal to be as frugal as I could, was still far more than I needed to satisfy my college student tastes. Still, my coworkers laughed at the apartment as the type of place an Indian engineer would live in — not a flophouse by any means, but clearly not the level of luxury a white person should treat himself to.
Finally!
There’s a health policy joke that MIT’s Jon Gruber likes to tell: A health economist dies and goes to heaven. When he gets there, he is greeted by St. Peter and told that he can ask God one question. The economist asks, “Will there ever be universal health insurance coverage in the United States?” God replies, “Yes, but not in my lifetime.”
The city of tomorrow
I hadn’t expected much coming out of college. I knew that recessions were not kind to the young and inexperienced, so I was surprised when I received an offer from the Boston Consulting Group to work as a business consultant in Dubai.
Calm down? I think not
Health care protesters are an unruly lot. They’ve broken windows. They’ve sent threatening letters to congressmen. They’ve called representatives bad names and spat at them. By the standards of American politics, this is small potatoes, and like everything else, it too shall pass.
What if you went to school for free?
Across the nation, college students and faculty were recently protesting, sometimes violently, against tuition hikes by public universities. Faced with grim budget outlooks, state governments have reduced funding to higher education; the worst cuts are in California, where perpetual fiscal mismanagement has left legislators with few alternatives. As the cost of an MIT education (the sum of tuition, fees, books, room and board) crosses $50,000 next year, there may be a temptation among some MIT students to join in and stage the same sort of sit-ins and rallies that have appeared elsewhere.
Debunking trade myths
On February 24th, Barack Obama appeared before the Business Roundtable, an association of corporate CEOs, to give an address on what has now become a major talking point of his administration: competitiveness. In the president’s view, the main problem facing the U.S. is that other nations are catching up, they are making investments in education and infrastructure that have been unmatched by the United States, and as a consequence, American economic well-being has been eroded. The solution, he explained, is to renew America’s competitive edge with fresh investment, health care reform, stricter financial oversight, and closer integration between business and government to promote American exports abroad. In his own words, “Winning the competition means we need to export more of our goods and services to other nations.”
Lessons from the crisis
Before discussing banking reform, it is necessary to first understand why and how financial markets operate.
Paying for Mrs. Fuller
In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act, an insurance program designed to cover against what were then considered the greatest financial risks in American society: disability, unemployment, loss of spouse or parents, and, most notably, old age. At the time, the poverty rate among the elderly was over 50 percent — the Great Depression had wiped out the savings of many, and older citizens, whose best wage-earning years were behind them, were particularly hard hit. By funding the benefits of current retirees with income taxes on current workers, Social Security constituted a major windfall for its first generation of recipients; Ida May Fuller, the very first citizen to receive a Social Security check, paid $24.75 into the system and received back $22,888.92 over the course of her lifetime. In this manner, the program theoretically provided a way to spread out the pain of the Great Depression — each generation would pay some ever-declining amount to the previous generation until the entirety of that one monumental loss had been spread out across decades.
Get over it
Thirteen months ago, I wrote an article for this newspaper entitled “Screw Bipartisanship,” in which I claimed there was a fundamental disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on the most important problem facing health care markets. I suggested that, rather than fruitlessly try to find common ground, Democrats should ignore the Republican point of view and muscle through legislation that would mandate individual insurance coverage.
It’s the incompetence, stupid
In George Washington’s farewell address, the president warned of the growing influence of partisanship and the dangers of entangling alliances abroad. In Dwight Eisenhower’s goodbye, the president intoned menacingly about the creation of what he called a “military-industrial complex” and its undue influence on the American political landscape. George Bush’s farewell address was devoted to one topic — terrorism — and though the tenor was optimistic, the message was clear: Our enemies remain, and they will attack us again.
Public option? How about a private option?
As national health care reform passes into Schrödingerian un-death (a quantum-pundit state of simultaneously being both perma-killed and on its way to certain victory), it is tempting to wallow in self-defeating cynicism and bemoan the eternal incompetence of the left wing. After their latest botching of the political process, it is clear that Democrats should be demoted from a “political party” to something a little more their league, like a “political intramural team” (with matches every other Thursday so long as Chad doesn’t screw up the scheduling again). For long-time supporters of health insurance mandates (myself included), it is difficult to summon the will to do anything but face-palm the remainder of 2010 away and wait for the inevitable Republican take-over of Congress. At least then we’ll have the opportunity to blame government gridlock on something real, like an irreconcilable partisan split between our executive and legislative branches.
Global warming in the hot seat
In November 2009, hackers released of thousands of confidential e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. Although the e-mails did not reveal scientific fraud or the fabrication of scientific evidence (as recently concluded in a partial decision by an internal review board) they did suggest that researchers at the CRU had become partisan in their support of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.
Bomb ’em when they’re down
It shouldn’t be necessary at this point, but given the pockets of feigned disbelief that remain abroad, it deserves repeating: The Iranians are developing nuclear weapons. Rhetorically, they continue to maintain the pretense of pursuing peaceful nuclear power, but the structure of their program belies its true nature as a weapons development effort. Their near-exclusive focus on isotopic enrichment, their construction of clandestine facilities, and their recent decision to enrich uranium to levels higher than what is necessary for commercial power plants are all signals that should remove whatever doubt remains of Iranian intentions. What Iran has achieved to date amounts to a small but growing breakout capacity. If they continue on their current pace, by mid-2010 they will have enough low-to-medium enriched uranium to produce several atomic bombs and the centrifuge capacity to bring that material to weapons readiness within a few months.
Mission creep
Afghanistan used to be a simple narrative: We’re going after the bad guys. It had a mission that could be summed up in two words: happy hunting. There was a simple exit strategy: Put Osama Bin Laden’s head on a pike, light up cigars, and slap each other on the back as we saunter off to the C-130’s and fly home.
Late to the Party
The french politician Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, upon seeing a crowd marching through Paris, supposedly once said: “There go my people. I must find out where they’re going so I can lead them.” In the wake of their humiliating defeat in Massachusetts, many Democratic strategists are now embracing the spirit of Ledru-Rollin, urging their party to adopt a more “Main Street” tone in order to survive the mid-term elections this November.
Out of the Wilderness and Back into the Big Tent
For the GOP, it really wasn’t that bad of an election, considering the circumstances. Amid corruption, scandal, and mismanagement of affairs both at home and abroad, Republicans still managed to pull in 45.7% of the popular vote. That they did so is a testament to the enduring conservatism of America’s electoral landscape.
Populists at the Gate
In the beginning, it was nothing more than knee-jerk catharsis, drawn from the tattered, frustrated, and disenfranchised remnants of small-c conservatives and angry libertarians. It was disorganized and chronically off-message, defenseless against being used as a public soapbox by every ‘birther’ conspiracist and one-world-government loon that didn’t feel he had a large enough audience on the Ron Paul internet forums. It was derided as far-right fringe, dismissed as corporate astroturf, and joyfully mocked as latently homosexual.
The Real Danger of Qom
On September 25, at the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh, President Obama revealed to the world that Iran has been covertly constructing an uranium enrichment facility outside the holy city of Qom. Flanked by his allies Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, Obama demanded that Iran disclose the entirety of its nuclear activities “or be held accountable.”
Moral Duty
It seems odd to write advice “to the graduating class of 2009” when I myself am one of the graduates. If you’re reading this during Commencement, I am currently somewhere between Dublin and Dubai, about to begin my new life as a consultant in the Middle East. When I started writing for <i>The Tech</i> back in September, I’d hoped to lay out the beliefs that make me a conservative. Nineteen articles later, I’ve commented on the 2008 election, written policy pieces on everything from education to health care to economics to foreign policy, and even tossed in a few articles on my favorite subject, energy — but I still haven’t gotten to write that defining piece that goes beyond policy prescriptions to core political philosophy. This is the 20th and final article that I’ll written for <i>The Tech</i>. I guess it’s now or never.
Goldilocks and the Three Lessons from the Derivatives Market
Imagine for a moment that you are a commercial bank called the Papa Bear Bank Company. You accept deposits from large businesses and use the money to make loans to other businesses and consumers. The interest on the money you loan out is a little bit higher than the interest you pay to your depositors, and as a result you make a tidy bit of revenue. You use this revenue to pay your workers, dole out dividends to your shareholders, and host the occasional junket in Yellowstone.
Cleverer and Cleverer
It was all the way back in the middle of November when I first wrote about the brewing issue of appointments to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. To catch you up: the NRC is led by a five-man commission, with one of them serving at the President’s discretion as the chairman of the body. The commission controls the high level nuclear regulatory policy in the United States, and as such plays an important role in the development of nuclear power.
Democrats Need to Go Back to the Blackboard on Education Policy
Basketball-player-cum-Secretary-of-Education Arne Duncan recently outlined the president’s proposal to reform our nation’s schools, and for those who follow education policy, the plan was a frustrating let-down. Duncan’s plan consisted of two major points: increasing the resources put towards early childhood education and extending the school year. Both are failed strategies that will significantly raise educational costs without significantly improving results.
The Schizophrenic-in-Chief
In hindsight it’s hard to believe, but there once was a time when I thought I knew where President Obama stood on free trade. Just a year ago he was on the campaign trail in Ohio, claiming that “one million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA” and pledging as president to “renegotiate” the treaty to the satisfaction of labor interests in the U.S. In front of crowds of unemployed workers in Ohio and Texas, his beliefs were as simple as they were hyperbolic: free trade agreements “ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart.”
Obama’s Nuclear Weapons Plan
Early this April, President Obama unveiled his vision for strengthening the world’s nuclear non-proliferation regime: renewed arms reduction talks with Russia and the creation of an international fuel bank in Kazakhstan to provide fuel services to non-weapons states. Both are excellent ideas which are long overdue, but neither will resolve the major proliferation threats facing us today.
The Quixotic Search for a Silver Bullet
Take it from a nuclear engineer: there is no future in fusion power. It will never be economical. Even if the very sizable technical hurdles were surmounted — magnetics, plasma physics, materials, and tritium availability to name a few — the capital cost of fusion’s heat island (the reactor sans turbines and other accouterments), would still be 2-3 times greater than that of a fission reactor, on a per-MW basis.
Lowered Expectations
By any measure, the $787 billion stimulus bill will fall well short of solving the problems facing the economy. Over the next two years, the expected shortfall between potential and actual gross domestic product is projected to reach $2 trillion — this legislation doesn’t even come to half of that.
Idealist or Realist?
Obama’s muddled thinking on foreign policy will walk him into the same pitfalls as his predecessor
Screw Bipartisanship
When it comes to health care policy, two viable economic theories are battling it out across the left-right spectrum.
Out of the Wilderness and Back into the Big Tent
For the GOP, it really wasn’t that bad of an election, considering the circumstances. Amid corruption, scandal, and mismanagement of affairs both at home and abroad, Republicans still managed to pull in 45.7% of the popular vote. That they did so is a testament to the enduring conservatism of America’s electoral landscape.
A Critical Junction
Illinois produces more megawatts of nuclear power than any other state in the union, accounting for nearly 12 percent of the national total, and Barack Obama, the junior senator from the land of Lincoln, has had a very cosy relationship with the state’s nuclear industry over the years. The employees of the Exelon Corporation, the largest operator of commercial nuclear power plants in the U.S., have donated at least $300,000 to Obama since 2003, and for his part, Obama has danced with those who brung him.
I’m Endorsing Rationality for President
I’m a positivist. I believe in the power of empirical evidence. I believe that political issues, such as healthcare and education, deserve to be analyzed through the lens of scientific inquiry.
Grand New Party
On August 29th, in a historic move that surprised pundits, Senator John McCain announced his selection of Alaskan governor Sarah Palin (pronounced PAY-lin, not PAH-lin) for his vice presidential running mate. The reaction from the left was immediate and visceral; feminists claimed the choice was patronizing, liberal bloggers sardonically thanked McCain for the giving them the election and the Obama campaign lashed out, calling the governor inexperienced and a pawn of Big Oil.
Deconstructing the Paradox of Thrift
It’s “recessiontime” in America. The sweet scent of bailout is in the air, the auto companies are performing their courtship rituals in Congress and the bears are frolicking in the marketplace. This is the time of year when a young economist’s fancy turns to thoughts of financial stimulus … BIG financial stimulus.
A Brief Response
A week ago I wrote an article on the Georgian conflict titled “Eastern Promises.” In the article, I described the rhetoric being trotted out by foreign policy hawks to justify a hard stance against Russia, dismissed their narrative as flawed, and then argued for why even if the narrative was correct, it would be in U.S. interests to engage Russia diplomatically rather than revert to a Cold War us-them mentality.
Eastern Promises
The United States should carefully consider its foreign policy priorities before it makes commitments to endangered neighbors of Russia.
Is This a ‘Daddy’ election?
Two months ago, it looked like the McCain camp was in shambles. The Arizona senator was struggling to read from a teleprompter, giving speeches in front of garish green backdrops, and standing behind podiums that made him look small and awkward. His campaign organization was muddled, full of deadweight managers who lacked the skills to play in the big leagues, but whom the senator didn’t have the heart to fire. And instead of moving to the center, as most candidates do in the general election, McCain, if anything, was moving to the right. In national polls he was only behind by four points, but with the enthusiasm gap, the fundraising numbers, and the dismal condition of the Republican brand, pundits were confident that John McCain was well on his way to a crushing defeat in November.