The Tory-PQ Alliance

The Parti Quebecois is riding high in the polls at the moment, though a provincial election is a long way off. And it seems to be filled with enthusiasm and vigor at the moment, coming off its convention this weekend-- though I can't say that I find the 93% vote in support of Pauline Marois to be quite so impressive as it's being made out to be. It sends the signal "in the face of a possible victory in the medium-term future, we are capable of acting as a basically unified and functional organization and not undermining our leader for no good reason." That's better than the PQ has sometimes done in the past, but it's not a dazzling accomplishment.

I fear that the real boost to the PQ's fortunes right now is coming from elsewhere: the Harper campaign.

To a first approximation, the median Quebec voter wants recognition as a distinct society, an advantageous fiscal relationship with Ottawa, and *not* to secede, have a vote on secession, or back into secession by a forced confrontation. That translates into a preference for voting for the Bloc as a substitute for voting for the PQ. The Bloc and the PQ are allies, of course-- but they are also rivals, in that the Bloc's success in extracting concessions at the center undermines the PQ's claim of urgency within the province. Voting for the Bloc thus becomes the safety valve, releasing nationalist-secessionist pressure and dampening fervor for the PQ and for secession.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a healthy dynamic. I don't like the Bloc; but I view them as a desirable feature of the Canadian political system, keeping pressure on the center to accommodate Quebec, and thereby keeping federation tolerable for Quebec.

But that dynamic only works if the Bloc is perceived to carry some weight in Ottawa. A Harper majority, and especially a Harper majority won on the basis of a nationwide attack on Quebec secessionist sentiment as manifested in support for the Bloc, will leave the average francophone Quebec voter with a sense of not having a voice, of having the desire to be maitres chez nous delegitimized in Canadian politics. Even if Harper doesn't win his majority, he's contributed to that delegitimation by making the thought of a de facto coalition with the Bloc anathema.

That can only be good for the PQ, two years out.

Hither and yon, Montreal edition: today at ISA

1:45 PM (TC61)

Cosmopolitanism, Institutions, and Non-Ideal Theory

Room: Parlor Suite 2020, Fairmont


Chair: Catherine Lu (McGill University)

Discussant: Daniele Archibugi (National Research Council)

Luis Cabrera. "Is There a Duty to Support Unjust Institutions above the State?"

Ryoa Chung. "Soft Law, Soft Power and Smart Politics in the NonIdeal World: A Pragmatic Approach to Cosmopolitanism."

Jacob Levy. "Contra Politanism: Against the Moral Teleology of Political Forms"

Laura Valentini. "On the Duty to Create Just Global Institutions: Dilemmas of Non-Compliance"

March 18: Federalism, Security, Democracy, and the European Alternative

Federalism, Security, Democracy, and the European Alternative
Friday March 18
McGill, Ferrier 456, 840 Dr Penfield

Cosponsored by the Research Group on Constitutional Studies, McGill University
and
The Maxwell European Union Center, Syracuse University


1. 9:00-10:15: Federalism and Its Levels

Jacob T. Levy, "Federalism contra Subsidiarity"
Frank Pasquale, "Federalism in an Age of Fusion Centers"
Jason Sorens, “The New Economics of Ethnofederalism”

Break 15 Minutes

2. 10:30-11-45: Has Europe failed?

Daniele Archibugi, “Cosmopolitanism at Europe's Borders”
Cassiano Hacker-Cordon, “Europe’s Struggles and Global Justice”
John Hall,”Europe: "Banalities of Success"
Glyn Morgan, “The Failure of Europe’s Constitutional Alternative”


Break 15 minutes

3. 12:00-2:00: Security, Justice, and Democracy (Lunchtime Session)

Glen Newey, “Security’s Sake”
Laura Valentini, “Justice and democracy"
Patti Lenard, "Security, Justice and Democracy"

It's the apocalypse

Time to panic, hoard, and acquire shotguns.

Political theory in Montreal

A busy couple of weeks.

Tonight:

Michael Zuckert (Notre Dame), public lecture, Concordia, Hall Building, Room H-767, ƒ455 de Maisonneuve W: "Slavery and the Constitutional Convention."

Tomorrow and Saturday:
Conference on Aristotle's Politics

Friday:Thomson House, room 406:

9:00

Opening 
remarks

9:30‐11:00
Andrés 
Rosler,
 University 
of 
Buenos
 Aires
“Political 
Virtue:

 Citizenship, 
Democracy, 
and 
War”

11:00‐12:30
Fred
 D.
 Miller, 
Jr., 
Bowling 
Green 
State 
University
“The 
Rule 
of 
Reason”

2:00‐3:30
Karen 
Margrethe 
Nielsen, 
University 
of 
Western 
Ontario
“On
 Economy 
and
 Private
 Property”

3:30‐5:00
Donald 
Morrison, 
Rice 
University
“The 
Common
 Good”

Saturday, Leacock 927

9:30‐11:00
Marguerite 
Deslauriers,
 McGill 
University
“Unity
 and 
Inequality”

11:00‐12:30
Richard 
Kraut, 
Northwestern 
University
“Aristotle
 and
 Rawls
 on
 the 
Common
 Good"

Tomorrow:
GRIPP: Catherine Zuckert, Notre Dame: 'Plato’s Philosophers: The Political Payoff.' New CHancellor Day Hall, 3644 Peel, room 200-- please read the paper in advance.

Tuesday March 15

Global Justice and Health Inequalities
Ferrier 456

Introduction and welcome (coffee served): 8:45-9:15am
Patti Tamara Lenard, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa
Jacob Levy, Department of Political Science, McGill University
Christine Straehle, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa

9:15-10:45 am: Responsibility and health inequalities
Who is responsible for health inequalities? Who should bear the responsibility for remedying inequalities? Is health inequality distinct from other forms of inequality, or it is it derivative of wealth inequality more generally?
Garrett Wallace Brown, University of Sheffield, Global Health Inequality and the Demands of Cosmopolitan Global Justice
Mira Johri, Ryoa Chung and Ted Schrecker, Department of Health, University of
Montreal, Department of Philosophy, University of Montreal, Globalization and Health Equity Unit, Institute of Population Health, University of Ottawa, Global health and national borders

Angela Kaida, Simon Fraser University, Women and HIV: Our collective moral obligation to improve the health of HIV-affected women and children in developing countries
Disc: Pierre-Yves Néron, Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l'Université de Montréal

10:45-11:15 – coffee break

11:15-12:30: Boundaries and health inequalities
What is the moral status of boundaries that include some and exclude others from adequate health care? Do boundaries matter for delineating who carries the obligation to remedy health inequalities?
Yukiko Asado, Dalhousie University, Population boundaries for health inequalities
Phillip Cole, University of Wales, Westport, ‘Illegal’ Immigrants and Access to Health Care
Disc: Anna Drake, Queen’s University


12:30-2pm – lunch

2-3:15 pm: Globalization and health inequalities
How does an emphasis on our shared humanity, or the shared global space of justice, affect our sense of what we owe to others from the perspective of health
Lisa Eckenwiler, George Mason University, An ecological conception of global health equity
Ted Schrecker, University of Ottawa, Cartographies of obligation: the global marketplace and global health ethics
Disc: Sarah Weibe, University of Ottawa

3:15-3:45pm – coffee break

3:45-5:15 pm: Vulnerability, humanitarianism and health inequalities
How does an understanding of vulnerability add to our sense of our responsibilities to remedy global health inequalities? How should we think about health inequalities in times of humanitarian disaster? Do health inequalities and the vulnerabilities they induce warrant being termed a “humanitarian disaster” in and of themselves?
Christine Straehle, University of Ottawa, Health Care Migration, Vulnerability and Individual Agency
Patti Tamara Lenard, University of Ottawa, Treating inequality in health care access as a humanitarian disaster
Ryoa Chung and Matthew R. Hunt, University of Montreal, University of Montreal/McMaster University, Health inequalities, vulnerability and humanitarian crises

Disc: Adina Preda, Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l'Université de Montréal


5:15-5:45pm: Wrap-up


Graduate Student “Rapporteurs”:
Cathy Nguyen, University of Ottawa
Kate Wood, University of Ottawa

Wednesday March 16 - Saturday March 19

Annual meeting of the International Studies Association. See schedule for the International Ethics section here.

Friday March 18
Federalism, Security, Democracy, and the European Alternative
Ferrier 456

1. 9:00-10:15: Federalism and Its Levels

Jacob T. Levy, "Federalism contra Subsidiarity"
Frank Pasquale, "Federalism in an Age of Fusion Centers"
Jason Sorens, “The New Economics of Ethnofederalism”

Break 15 Minutes

2. 10:30-11-45: Has Europe failed?

Daniele Archibugi, “Cosmopolitanism at Europe's Borders”
Cassiano Hacker-Cordon, “Europe’s Struggles and Global Justice”
John Hall,”Europe: "Banalities of Success"
Glyn Morgan, “The Failure of Europe’s Constitutional Alternative”


Break 15 minutes

3. 12:00-2:00: Security, Justice, and Democracy (Lunchtime Session)

Glen Newey, “Security’s Sake”
Laura Valentini, “Justice and democracy"
Patti Lenard, "Security, Justice and Democracy"

March 21-25
Jon Elster


Traité critique de l’homme économique - le désintéressement
Lundi 21 mars, 18 h
UQAM - Bibliothèque centrale
400, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, local A-M204 (niveau métro)

La théorie du choix rationnel et ses critiques
Mercredi 23 mars, 18 h
UQAM - Pavillon Thérèse-Casgrain
455, boulevard René-Lévesque Est, local W-5215


Justice, Truth and Peace
Jeudi 24 mars, 17 h
McGill - Moot Court, New Chancellor Day Hall
3644, rue Peel (entrée par le 3660, rue Peel)

Le rôle des émotions dans l’explication de l’action
Vendredi 25 mars, 10 h
UQAM - Pavillon Thérèse-Casgrain
455, boulevard René-Lévesque Est, local W-5215

Elsewhere

I haven't written anything there yet, but I've joined with a great team of simpatico philosophers over at the new blog Bleeding Hearts Libertarians. More to come.

Hey, look at that

Now that the earmark bans are in place, it's evident to everyone that earmarks affect spending levels.

When House Republicans were searching for cuts to offer Senate Democrats as part of a temporary spending plan to avert a government shutdown, they were able to reach into accounts set aside for earmarks and find nearly $2.8 billion that would have previously gone to water projects, transit programs and construction programs. No earmarks, no need for that money, and the threat of an imminent shutdown was eased.

Lawmakers said the absence of earmarks also allowed for a more freewheeling debate on the House floor during consideration of the Republican plan to slash $61 billion from this year’s budget since Democrats and Republicans were not caught up in protecting the special provisions they had worked so hard to tuck into the spending bill.

“This is a completely new experience, and a good one,” said Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who had lost scores of attempts on the House floor to strip earmarks from spending bills.

While spending on earmarks is a tiny portion of the budget, critics like Mr. Flake and Mr. Boehner said they played an insidious role in pushing up federal spending through what is known in legislative terms as logrolling.

Top members of the Appropriations Committee might, for instance, grant a lawmaker’s request for a few million dollars for an important project back home. That lawmaker would then be obligated to support the entire multibillion-dollar bill despite possible reservations. Woe to the person who gets an earmark and then opposes the bill; chances for a future earmark would be somewhere between zero and none.

“You get millions for an earmark and end up voting for billions of dollars that you may oppose,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government watchdog group.

(For previous discussion, see here.)

On Liberty

Matt Yglesias:

[quoting] The Georgia dissidents rallied behind the revealing slogan “Liberty and Property without restrictions”—which explicitly linked the liberty of white men to their right to hold blacks as property. Until they could own slaves, the white Georgians considered themselves unfree. [/quoting] It’s a very interesting quirk of rhetoric. Freedom-talk tends, in practice, to have very little to do with any respectable notion of freedom.

Provides an occasion for two of my favorite quotes.

Samuel Johnson, on Americans: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

Orlando Patterson, on the general phenomenon:

The basic argument of this work is that freedom was generated from the experience of slavery. People came to value freedom, to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life, as a result of their experience of, and response to, slavery or its recombinant form, serfdom, in their roles as masters, slaves, and nonslaves.

Clever or pretentious?

My admiration for this idea, a riff on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue by Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes (and see the contributions of art museums to the idea here) was almost-- but not quite-- entirely undone by this: "Green confesses that he hasn't seen the Sports Illustrated version: 'The newsstand near me carries Cooks Illustrated, The Nation, Bookforum, The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The New York Review of Books. It seems not to carry Sports Illustrated.'"

You're already tweaking SI and propagating great works of art. Do you really need to further prove your high-culture bona fides with this kind of "I don't even own a television" tedium?

In addition to being absurdly and unnecessarily pretentious (look at that list! Surely you local newsagent carries something else; the only purpose of that list is culture-status grabbing), I just don't believe it. The kind of bookstore newsstands that carry The Chronicle of Philanthropy (not many!) carry pretty nearly everything. They might sell out of the swimsuit issue; they don't not carry it. And the places that can support such highbrow newsstands (big cities and some college towns) also support more than one newsstand. In that kind of place, one's eyes are eventually sullied by passing over the cover of a magazine that is less highbrow than one's own tastes. One grits one's teeth and endures; one need not fib about the experience.

Freedom of associations/ freedom in associations watch

Arizona is considering requiring universities to allow concealed-carry permit holders to wear their guns on campus, and Texas seems to be close to doing so.

One view: This fails to recognize the autonomy of universities as self-governing institutions. Merits aside, it is rightly a matter for universities to decide. Universities are much more likely than state legislatures to correctly understand the dynamics of classroom life, dormitory life, Greek systems and drinking, and much more that should go into making a decision about permitting firearms on campus. Public universities should be free (as private universities are) to decide that for themselves.

Another view: students and professors do not leave their freedom at the campus gates. The First Amendment directly applies to public universities: their self-government does not extend to passing hate-speech regulations, or discriminating against religious student newspapers, or judging candidates for employment based on their political views, or establishing a religion. In the many American states where the voters and/or legislatures have decided that individual freedom encompasses wide latitude to carry firearms in public places, the public universities don't have any authority to trump that judgment. Public universities, unlike private universities, must respect the freedom of their members as individuals. Their associational freedom to make their own internal rules is a lesser matter, and even somewhat suspect, since they are state agencies.

It is probably not an accident

that the U.S. and Canada have the relative positions that they do on this chart, since it is based on data from after I moved north.

Oh, good.

Because the problem with purebred dogs is that they're not inbred enough, let's start thinking in terms of "endangered" breeds that should be rescued by breeding lots and lots of dogs from just four ancestors.

I'm a serious dog people, as those who know me will attest. But breed-fetishization holds no appeal for me. We've been mixing dogs' genes for thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of years, to meet our needs and desires at the time. There's nothing sacred about the sub-speciation that happened to be in effect when the Kennel Clubs came into existence. The otterhounds are cute, sure. But if we've inbred the otterhound to the point of epilepsy, and we no longer need dogs to hunt otters, why on earth should we go on inbreeding them and trying to create demand for them where none exists, instead of reshuffling the genetic cards and getting some healthier mutts and, eventually, new breeds? The need to have dogs available as props for historical reenactors and cosplayers doesn't really strike me as compelling. If there are enough of the cosplayers to sustain demand, that's fine, but if there aren't, I don't think the extinction of the breed would be an object of great concern. (The life of each individual dog is an object of concern, but not the fate of the breed.) Dogs' genetic differentiation and specialization is a human creation for human needs; the otterhound- polar bear analogy doesn't hold. And we will, happily, go on having, and making, lots of different kinds of dogs for the foreseeable future.

Sasha's asteroid

Sasha Volokh suggests, in accordance with orthodox libertarian rights theory, that

"taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective. I think it’s O.K. to violate people’s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people’s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). But it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights; if that’s so, then I’m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation.

This is met with a sensible rejoinder from Matt Yglesias and that blank look of incredulity that Brad DeLong sometimes affects in lieu of argument. But I can sympathize even with Brad here. The conclusion is absurd, and as Matt says, that means that something has gone badly wrong somewhere along the way.


I'll again quote from my argument about this kind of thing.

I propose to treat the state as a morally contingent form of social organization that is nonetheless pervasive in the world we inhabit and in any world we can reasonably imagine in the medium-term future.

If we do so, one consequence is that we should view state officials as wielding a great deal of power in our social world that is probably not justified all the way down. States did not come about by individualist contractualist consent; they are not the institutional form of morally foundational nations; religious, hereditary, and customary forms of legitimation may remain sociologically credible in some places but are surely not morally well-grounded accounts of the justifications for the organized use of violence. Yet states are such well-entrenched features of the political landscape that, if can constrains ought at all, we are probably not morally obligated to abolish the state form in favor of some other form of political organization or in favor of anarchy of any description. We must morally make the best of them, making do with what we have.

In a world filled with states, officeholders and officials should view themselves as having political responsibility as analyzed by Weber, which is much like [David] Miller’s remedial responsibility. They wield power that is not morally legitimated by its origins; the power exists because of morally neutral historical and social accidents. What remains is moral responsibility for what is done with the power.

State officials then confront a world in which their authority gives them unusual power over outcomes. In a world full of drowning children, they are unusually likely to have access to life preservers. As Miller stresses, it is important not to view the world as always only made up of drowning children; we must also be able to see ourselves as partly responsible for the creation of our circumstances, our social worlds, and our outcomes. But even with that caveat in mind, there are drowning children enough to go around. Miller draws on Virginia Held’s (1970) famous argument that a random collection of individuals can be held morally responsible, to suggest that if they can, surely more substantial collectives like nations can be. But Held’s “random collection” shouldn’t be passed by so quickly; it is a serviceable shorthand for the reality of fellow-citizenship in a modern state, who make up a random collection of individuals who happen to be socially organized in a particular, contingent but powerful, way.

The state’s first duty, the prevention of interpersonal violence, follows more or less straightforwardly from the kind of social organization that the state is: the agency that is able to claim and enforce a local monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force. Not all forms of political organization have been like that, and the responsibilities of officeholders under them differed accordingly. But the ability to prevent private violence is constitutive of the modern state, which just for that reason acquires a responsibility to do so in accordance with the background moral rights of persons to be free from violence. Similarly, it acquires a responsibility to protect against theft and against aggression from outside its boundaries. It has displaced all other possible protectors; it has both the greatest ability and (due to its own actions) the only ability to defend against force; and so it bears the responsibility to do so.

Orthodox libertarianism would hold that this first responsibility (understood to include the prevention of private theft, not only personal violence) also more or less exhausts the state’s responsibilities. But the creation of the social technology that can protect against internal and external violence—for example, the creation of a professional body of armed men trained for coordinated action and a financial apparatus that can support that body—means that there is a significant concentration of physical and fiscal power on hand. And there may well be an overprovision of that power, since an underprovision is irresponsible and generates political pressure for state actors to fulfill their duties, and “just right” provision at the level that would keep police and armed forces working at precisely their whole capacity would be an astronomically unlikely coincidence. Then, unavoidably, the slack in the system provides the state and state actors with situations in which they have a unique capacity to prevent or mitigate harms and suffering. The police force created to prevent crimes also has the ability to respond to car crashes. The public fisc created to fund an army also has the ability to feed the starving. I am sure that there is no morally decent way to insist that the police officer refuse in principle to aid people in danger even if the danger wasn’t caused by crime, even though that means that the taxpayers will be involuntarily funding some use of the officer’s time that is not connected to rights-protection, even if the resulting situation is a violation of the best understanding of taxpayers’ property rights. Nor will it just be a matter of the personal benevolence of the police officer who wants to be free to prevent non-criminal harms while on the clock. If capacity and proximity can generate outcome-responsibility, then it can be the officer’s responsibility to act—and, accordingly, the responsibility of the state of which the officer is an agent.
Once the public fisc can prevent non-criminal harms indirectly, by paying its personnel to do so, it is a difficult distinction to maintain that it may not prevent them directly, by, e.g., feeding the hungry. Indeed, the distinction is probably an impossible one, and so all non-autocracies will end by being in the business of distribution (Dahl 1993). Once states are distributing benefits—and even physical protection is a benefit about which distributive decisions are made, as is perfectly evident when looking at the geographic unevenness of police protection in all countries—they face moral constraints about how and to whom they should be distributed. That is, there are problems of political redistributive justice, even if redistribution is not in itself demanded by justice.

I do not suppose that these brief remarks will persuade my fellow libertarians that they ought to abandon their views on redistributive spending. But perhaps they will agree that the police officer on duty has a responsibility (and not just the responsibility borne by any natural person) to aid the drowning child, even though doing so is a drain on taxpayer resources that is not for the sake of the prevention of interpersonal rights-violations, even though doing so provides a kind of subsidized in-kind insurance against misfortunes that are not injustices. The subsidy is not itself a demand of libertarian justice but of public responsibility conditional on the fact of public power; but once the subsidy exists, it is constrained by concerns about justice. A state could not justifiably intentionally deploy police differentially according to the race of the children likely to be at risk of drowning.

(From Levy, "National and Statist Responsibility," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Volume 11, Issue 4 December 2008 , pages 485 - 499.)

In other words: it is obviously morally false that no steps may legitimately be taken to prevent the earth from an asteroid collision. It may be that in some alternate world without coercive states, alternate forms of social organization would have arisen that would have the organizational capacity to build the space cannon (or whatever). But we live in a world in which states have, for centuries, aggregated to themselves the function of the rapid large-scale organization of the means of applying great quantities of destructive kinetic energy. For good or for ill, they have displaced the social actors from that alternate world. If states may not act, then there is no one who both may and can, and that violates the premise at the beginning of this paragraph.

Say that I hold bad but effective land title-- if the property right to my land morally appropriately vests in an Indian tribe that may actually regain it someday, but hasn't yet. Indeed, I've been aggressively contesting their land claim; it is due in part to my own actions that they haven't reclaimed it. And then fire breaks out on a neighboring piece of land; my property is the appropriate place for a firebreak to protect much more area behind mine. (This could be a house in a city or a plot of forest.) But it is only likely, not guaranteed, that the fire will spread. So if I allow the firebreak on my land, I am knowingly and certainly destroying property value that might otherwise survive intact, on land that is not genuinely mine to destroy.

Or: I have stolen your car for a joy ride, and suddenly (god help me) see a trolley experiment unfolding in front of me. Instead of the fat man of some versions of the thought experiment, what I can put between the trolley and the people in peril is your car, probably totaling it.

In both cases, even if we concede that it was wrongful conduct that put me into the position of being the one able to prevent the catastrophic consequences, and even if the prevention will cause some moral harm, I have a clear duty to prevent the bad consequences. And-- for reasons familiar from Weber and Walzer, and fully articulated by Goodin in Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy-- state actors have an exceptionally strong duty to prevent bad consequences that they're in a position to effect.

Sasha's rights theory is the one I object to with the policeman and the drowning child: the child's rights are not being violated, so the policeman may not spend taxpayer-supported time rescuing her. Still less may he commit some new act of expropriation-- grabbing your expensive suede jacket off a nearby park bench to wrap around the cold and wet child. But the asteroid case is even worse: it's as though the city has declared a curfew in the park, so no one but the policeman legally could be in a position to help the child at all. Given that state of affairs, the world that at that moment exists, the policeman not only may but must act.

The strict believer in property rights could still say: I'd be responsible for the value of your car if I totaled it in that way, even to save lives, since my being in that position was a consequence of my own actions. And that's right-- though it is fully compatible with the view that I have a moral duty to act. So maybe, in the science fiction future world in which state officials are all called on to pay damages for the harms their coercive actions caused over the centuries, they might be liable for the taxation in support of the building of the space cannon, even though they had a moral duty to build it. (The state has the right to create a firebreak without the owner's consent, under its duty to provide for public safety, but it owes damages afterwards.)

But now suppose that you were one of the people standing on the track whose life was saved. And try to calculate the who owes damages to whom, in the event that a handful of state officials coercively extracted some billions of dollars from hundreds of millions of people, with the consequence that all life on earth was saved.

What all of this means is: Sasha's theory of what rights we have is not the only premise needed to make his argument go. Not even fiat justitia ruat coelum will do the work. He also needs an implausible theory in which moral duties in a non-ideal world are absolutely identical to moral duties in an ideal world. To defeat it, we only need introduce a moral equivalent of the lawyerly concept of estoppel. If you believe in the libertarian alternate world of statelessness, and you believe that states have wickedly prevented us from reaching that world, you should think that states are estopped from suddenly pleading "let justice be done" come the moment when the heavens are literally about to fall.

Political bias in academia, revisited yet again

Lots of people who should know better seem to be excited about this silly John Tierney article on this Jonathan Haidt presentation about political bias in the academy.

Haidt has taken things that surely by now everyone knows about politics and the academy-- e.g. that the professoriate leans left compared to the American populace as a whole-- and dressed them up in various bits of metaphor and jargon. Some of the metaphors are good ones; I like the magnet image. But they're metaphors, not evidence. Throw in what on usenet we once would have called ObLarrysummers, and the cute fact that it's social psychologists in the audience-- people who think of thesmelves as good at analyzing patterns of bias!-- and we're done. We have a just-so story about the evolution of taboos around topics having to do with race and gender straight out of the political correctness wars circa 1992, retold in a way that emphasizes what's supposed to be clear as soon as one says "taboo"-- that there's something magical and superstitious rather than rational about it.

But here's what we don't have:
1) Any meaningful new evidence about the political imbalance in the academy.
2) Any meaningful evidence at all of bias.
3) Any attempt whatsoever to sort out the competing explanations for the political imbalance that are the heart of any serious conversation on the topic.

Stipulating that the academy skews left compared with a random population sample (which is what Haidt's facially meaningless phrase "statistically impossible lack of diversity" actually means), we are always faced with the question of why. Random population samples are, after all, not something one usually comes across in daily life; even professional opinion pollsters trying to get such samples have real trouble doing so, because, e.g., the people who own landline phones, as opposed to no phones or only cell phones, aren't a random population draw, and if you survey using the phone book you'll get a skewed sample.

The common explanations:

1) Initial self-selection. Different careers reflect different mindsets and values, and the sorting into those careers early in means that there's no reason to expect them to look like random population draws. No one is surprised when the military skews right or the Peace Corps skews left. There's probably some sorting as between, say, those who go into business or finance of various kinds out of college and those who pursue PhDs. This point can be put in a value-neutral way, or said with whatever sanctimonious inflection one likes. "Conservatives are practical, and practical people go into business, while head-in-the-cloud unrealistic people want to go into an ivory tower." "Liberals believe in critical thought and reasoning, so they are naturally attracted to careers that value it; conservatives don't like having their assumptions questioned, so they naturally turn away from intellectual careers." Note that one has to go through another round of this in order to think about why any one discipline is politically skewed: economists, engineers, philosophers, and literary theorists are plausibly different groups of people to begin with, and they sort themselves out accordingly.

2) Selection and screening mechanisms. The favorite sanctimonious left-wing explanation for why there aren't conservatives in the academy is that the academy's various hurdles, from grad school admission onward, screen for intelligence, and conservatives are less intelligent people.

3) Change over time. The second-favorite sanctimonious left-wing explanation is that academics, who might start out with no real political views at all, are influenced by evidence and argument, and these favor movement toward the left, or at least toward a point farther left than the American median. Sometimes this is distinctively about the post-2001 years, but sometimes not. Common symptoms of this argument are the mindless repetition of John Stuart Mill's comments about conservatives being stupid or Lionel Trilling's "irritable mental gestures." Equally uninteresting is something like this: university professors, with their tenure and their taxpayer-funded salaries become left-wing because they resent their dependence on hard-working productive people who have real jobs; they spend their whole lives cut off from and failing to learn about markets, competition, and business, so what do you expect?

4) Bias-- whether unintended (the hostile environment "locker room talk" Haidt discusses) or intended ("don't tenure him, he's a Republican."). These are meaningfully different from each other, but both are problematic.

Sorting these out requires hard longitudinal work. When, in the decades from freshman year of college to tenure, does the political skew get introduced? Are conservatives disinclined to enter a given discipline at all, maybe just because they're disproportionately more interested in other things? Trying to enter the discipline but failing because they're not smart enough? Entering the discipline but becoming more left-wing over time? Trying to enter but dropping out because they're discouraged by groupthink? Or trying to enter but being kept out by overt bias? The answer may be "some of each," of course, and the dynamics may feed on each other-- but that's a hypothesis in its own right.

A slice-of-time show of hands at an academic conference in response to the question "who here is a conservative?" does absolutely nothing to sort any of this out. Neither does a google search on the phrases "liberal social psychologist" and "conservative social psychologist." Those two data only show what we already knew: the professoriate skews left. The two solicited anonymous e-mails complaining about uncomfortable environments provide anecdotal support for "unintended bias," but, well, not very much. And the cute fact that the presentation is being offered to social psychologists who study the emergence of bias in groups has some nice rhetorical effect in the room, but still doesn't add any insight.

I freely admit that sorting these questions of causation out is extremely hard. But anyone who claims to be talking about this subject and doesn't even acknowledge them, to say nothing of trying to solve them, hasn't added to our knowledge, and certainly hasn't provided any reason for supporters of the bias hypotheses to run around claiming vindication. The fact that the presentation (note: not an article, not a paper, a power point presentation at a conference) got a NYT write-up from a sympathetic columnist doesn't make it any more of a contribution to our knowledge.

Conference on federalism and its future

Federalism and Its Future
The University of Texas School of Law
February 10 – February 12, 2011


Thursday, February 10, 2011

4:30—6:00 p.m.
Eidman Courtroom (2.306)
Keynote Address

Vicki Jackson, Georgetown University: "Understanding U.S. Federalism: The Warren Court and Post World War II Models of Constitutional Legitimacy"

Friday, February 11, 2011
9:15—10:30 a.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Author: Michael Greve, Constitutional Disorder: The Promise and Pathology of American Federalism

Discussant: Jacob T. Levy
Moderator: Justin Driver

10:45 a.m.—12:00 p.m.

Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Authors: Malcolm Feely and Edward Rubin, Federalism: Political Identity and Tragic Compromise

Discussant: Andy Karch
Moderator: Lynn Baker

1:00—2:15 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Authors: Alison LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism

Ed Purcell, Originalism, Federalism, and the American Constitutional Enterprise: A Historical Inquiry

Discussants: Alison LaCroix, Ed Purcell

2:30—3:45 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Author: John Nugent, Safeguarding Federalism: How States Protect their Interests in National Policymaking

Discussant: Rob Mikos
Moderator: Abbe Gluck
Moderator: Willy Forbath

4:00—5:15 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Authors: Sujit Choudhry, Federalism, Secession and Devolution: From classical to Post-Conflict

Heather Gerken, The Supreme Court 2009 Term - Forward: Federalism All the Way Down


Discussants: Dan Halberstam, Vicki Jackson (Choudhry), Dan Rodriguez (Gerken)
Moderator: Zack Elkins

Saturday, February 12, 2011
9:15—10:30 a.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Author: Jenna Bednar, The Robust Federation

Discussant: Ann Bowman
Moderator: Frank Cross

10:45 a.m.—12:00 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Author: Erin Ryan, Federalism and the Tug of War Within

Discussant: Wendy Wagner
Moderator: Jim Rossi


1:00—2:15 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Author: Robert Schapiro, Polyphonic Federalism: Toward the Protection of Fundamental Rights

Discussant: Louise Weinberg
Moderator: Ernie Young


2:30—3:45 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Authors: Dan Rubinfeld and Robert Inman, Federal Institutions and the Democratic Transition: Learning from South Africa

Discussant: Rick Hills
Moderator: Dan Rodriguez

3:45 p.m.
Wrap-up

Earmarks revisited

Harry Reid is trying the "earmarks don't increase spending" line. I commented on that idea here.

Note toward a future blog post

Bradford Plumer, like Matt Yglesias, is a fan of the Chinese idea (I'm taking it for granted that they're right about this, I don't know it myself) of having good mayors promoted up through the mayorly ranks.

If the mayor of a small city—say, out in China's provinces—does a good job, then when his term is up he may get appointed as mayor of an even bigger city. Being able to govern a city is a useful skill, after all, so why not people who have shown some talent at it move up and try their hand at governing bigger cities, rather than restricting the job to whatever local dogcatcher can prove residency? Maybe voters don't want meddling outsiders. But they can make that choice themselves, no?

Sounds good. But I'll go with "no." In the American party system I'm thinking that turns mayorships into almost purely patronage positions. Every medium-sized city mayor in America decides to try to succeed Daley. Who will win? Well, there will be a Democratic primary to decide it. But with dozens of potential candidates who are poorly known to the local voters, someone is going to do some serious vetting: the incumbent's machine, or the governor if of the same party, or US Senators if of the same party... or the President if of the same party.

The U.S. has some 50,000 municipalities. The coordination problem of hundreds or thousands of mayors trying to move around the country and up the totem pole, when the voters "hiring" them in this odd labor market can't possibly have information about most of them, are huge. So, formally or informally, we'd end up with the Chinese model: the party hierarchy would provide the coordination.

American urban government is often nothing to write home about. But I'm unpersuaded that it would be improved by concentrating selection in the national political parties; and I think that's what this would necessarily amount to.

Added to the blogroll

Ethics for adversaries. Mission statement:

This blog is based on a hypothesis: that we made a slight mistake when we carved out the sub-fields of ethics and political philosophy. The blog will not, for the most part be trying to prove this hypothesis in a heavy-handed way, but hopes to make it a little more compelling by way of examples.

What was the mistake? At some point “we” assigned some scholars to work on the foundations of moral theory, and others to work on the foundations of political philosophy, and then several other mutually exclusive bands of scholars to look into the peculiar ethical challenges facing professionals working within particular kinds of institutions and professions, like business, law, politics, international relations, journalism, accounting, international relations and, say, sports.

So what’s the hypothesis? That there just may be something similar about the challenges faced in design of all the aforementioned institutions, and also in the ethical dilemmas faced by people working within these settings. And further, that the challenges of designing and justifying these institutions may strain any more foundational theories of justice that have not adequately accounted for how different these competitive institutions are from other “merely administrative” institutions. (And we suspect this includes almost all famous theories of justice — not least John Rawls’s.)

The institutions, professions, and practices that we will be exploring throughout this blog are what we might call “deliberately adversarial.” They set up highly — but never completely — regulated competitions in order (ideally, in principle, as if by an invisible hand) to benefits those outside the competitions. We do not need to use free(ish) markets to produce and distribute goods and services, but if we do so in the right way, consumers should get better value for their money. We have not always had an adversarial legal system, or democratic elections, but when we do, citizens should be less likely to face injustice. We could have events where athletes show off their individual physical talents, but we tend to find competitive sports, where they do this in an attempt to win, a more satisfying spectator experience.

When does it make sense to try to get results from competitions rather than merely by attempting to achieve them directly? Why aren’t cooperation, mutual deliberation, and professionalism more efficient and just ways to deliver services? And if we do need to structure competitive environments, how do we ensure that the system won’t be “gamed” by the players so that they benefit more than the intended beneficiaries (like consumers, criminal suspects, or the general public)?

These will be the sorts of questions we will have in mind in this blog as we search for examples of effective or flawed “deliberately adversarial institutions” all around us.

CFP: APT


CALL FOR PAPERS

Association for Political Theory 2011 Annual Conference
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana

Proposals due: February 15, 2011

The Association for Political Theory (APT) invites proposals for its ninth annual conference, October 13-15, 2011, at the University of Notre Dame. To learn more about the Association and its annual conference, please visit the APT website at: http://apt.coloradocollege.edu. The Association for Political Theory welcomes proposals from all approaches and on all topics in political theory, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. Faculty, advanced PhD candidates, and independent scholars are eligible to participate. We also encourage faculty to volunteer to serve as chairs and/or discussants.

How to Apply: To apply online, click on the following link . Proposals are due by midnight on Tuesday, February 15, 2011 (PST). Please review the proposal guidelines described below before completing a proposal form. Each participant may submit one paper and one co-authored paper proposal. To propose a paper, each participant must submit an abstract of 300-400 words and a recent copy of his/her vita. If a copy of the CV can be found online, the applicant can provide the web address in the relevant box on the proposal form. Otherwise, the applicant must email a copy of the CV to aptproposals@gmail.com with his or her name as the subject line. Each participant is required to submit a proposal form, even if the proposal is part of a co-authored paper. Please note: you must both submit the proposal form and email your CV in order for your proposal to be considered by the Program Committee.

PLEASE NOTE THAT IN A CHANGE FROM PREVIOUS YEARS, WE WILL NOT BE ACCEPTING PANEL OR ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS FOR THE 2011 CONFERENCE.

Chairs/Discussants: If you wish to participate as a chair and/or discussant, please note your areas of expertise and interest in the relevant box on the proposal form. You may offer to serve in both of these roles, but the Program Committee prefers to limit volunteers to one role to ensure broad participation in the conference. Presenting a paper does not preclude one from serving as a chair or a discussant in another panel.

Pre-circulation requirement: All papers accepted for the conference must be submitted electronically to an archive on the APT website no later than October 1, 2011. Please note that you should limit the length of your paper to 30 double-spaced pages of text so that discussants may provide suitable feedback. The archive will be password-protected so that access is limited to members of APT. Participants who fail to submit their paper to the archive by October 1, 2011 will be removed from the program.

Membership : Participation in the conference requires membership in the Association. Membership is free. Papers are available to APT members only, so conference participants will need to join APT in order to receive access to the archive. Click here to submit a membership application.

Questions and assistance: For questions about the program or proposal guidelines, or if you have any difficulty submitting a proposal form, please contact the Program Committee Co-Chairs, Alisa Kessel (akessel@pugetsound.edu) and Amit Ron (amit.ron@asu.edu).

***NEW APT INITIATIVE FOR 2011: Working Group Panel
“Power, Democracy, and the City”

This group is part of APT’s new Working Group initiative. Participants will engage in pre-conference dialogue as they prepare their papers, and the panel will serve as one moment in a longer collaboration. The format will enable scholars working on similar questions to learn from each other, develop their ideas over time, and create professional networks. The group will be chaired by Clarissa Hayward of Washington University in St. Louis. The intention is to submit the papers from this panel as a proposed special issue in the Journal of Power. Participants must have a first draft completed by August 15, 2011, and be ready at that time to share their work-in-progress and to comment on the work of the other participants. Just as for any APT paper, a polished version must be completed in time for presentation at the fall conference. For more information on this year’s working group theme, visit the APT Gateway website.

Potential participants should submit proposals via the proposal form and must indicate that they want their proposal to be considered for the working group panel. (You can submit the same proposal for both the working group panel and the general APT program, if you wish.) Papers will be selected by the working group panel chair and the APT program committee based on fit and strength. Generally, participants in APT working groups are expected to be at a post-dissertation stage of their career and to have begun publishing scholarly work. Once participants are notified of their acceptance and confirm their willingness to participate, members will develop a work-plan and schedule that include an initial re-reading and discussion of Robert Dahl's Who Governs? followed by the sharing of work in progress.

Cass Sunstein in the news

As part of its effort to mend fences with business, the Obama administration has ordered of a review of regulations to seek "the proper balance," trying to "ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth" and to remove "outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive." "Per a senior administration official, OMB Director Jack Lew is overseeing this effort, and it will be run out of Cass Sunstein’s office at OMB."

Left-leaning groups are predictably worried, and respond as if the mere notion that a regulation could be economically harmful is some kind of vile Republican lie.

Note that Obama's op-ed named just one example of overregulation, already repealed: the classification of saccharine as hazardous waste by the EPA. And it foresees new or stiffer "safety rules for infant formula; procedures to stop preventable infections in hospitals; efforts to target chronic violators of workplace safety laws." The emphasis of the piece is hardly on any claim that in fact there is too much regulation in any area. The tone is generally one that says "we've been doing things basically right and now we will confirm that with a self-audit."

I predict that almost no regulations will actually be repealed as a result of this, except in cases of conflict or redundancy with other regulations. I'm sure that compliance requirements can be simplified in many cases, and that we'll hear triumphant accounts of that: "Small businesses used to need to fill out 13 forms to do this; that has been reduced to 3." Almost any complex bureaucracy accumulates surplus paperwork requirements, and there are always reductions that can be made there just by deciding to look for them. But don't expect any sweeping round of deregulation here. Something more like Gore's "reinventing government" is the most to expect: basically worthy housecleaning, important to do every so often, but not at all fundamentally transformative of the regulatory balance. This is an effort to "change the tone," not to change the state.

Indeed, the Executive Order itself explicitly says "This order is supplemental to and reaffirms the principles, structures, and definitions governing contemporary regulatory review that were established in Executive Order 12866 of September 30, 1993"-- that is, the original order establishing the Reinventing Government initiative. It's a reaffirmation and refinement of existing practice. The greatest novelty is the order that each agency develop a plan for the periodic review of past regulations; but it seems that the reviews will be conducted by the agencies themselves, which already could have proposed changing their past rules had they wanted to.

One question, though: doesn't the new order mandate what Sunstein's office was supposed to be doing all along? He's a very energetic guy who likes to work long hours, and he was confirmed a year and a half ago. The Federal Register only grows by a couple of hundred pages per day, which is about his writing pace. Hasn't he already completed this review?

Update: See als these comments from Eric Posner.

Poli sci rankings

Last week Kieran Healey made use of a clever online setup to solicit pairwise comparisons of sociology departments to yield a set of rankings. He then set one up for philosophy, too. The latter now has more than 100,000 votes and yields these rankings . Soc has more than 65,000 and yields these rankings.

He kindly went and set up a political science rankings widget. Go vote. here are the results. Let's test out the Condorcetian wisdom of crowds-- and, as noted in the other two cases, see whether we can't improve on the NRC rankings. Added advantage: not restricted to the U.S.

Update: The PSJR trolls managed to deliberately wreck this, just to show that they could.

Princeton Graduate Conference in Political Theory

Graduate Conference in Political Theory
Princeton University
April 8-9, 2011

The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach or topic in political theory, political philosophy, or the history of political thought. Approximately eight papers will be accepted.

Each session, led by a discussant from Princeton, will be focused exclusively on one paper and will feature an extensive question and answer period with Princeton faculty and students. Papers will be pre-circulated among conference participants.

The keynote address will be given by Professor Patchen Markell of the University of Chicago.

Submissions are due via email to polthry@princeton.edu by Monday, January 10th, 2011. Please limit your paper submission to 7500 words and format it for blind review (the text should include your paper's title but be free of other personal and institutional information). Only graduate students who will be enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the time of the conference may submit papers; papers from post-doctoral students will not be accepted. Papers will be refereed by current graduate students in the Department of Politics at Princeton. Acceptance notices will be sent in February.

Assistance for invited participants' transportation, lodging, and meal expenses will be provided by the committee, which acknowledges the generous support of the Department of Politics, the University Center for Human Values, and the Graduate School of Princeton University.

More information is available at politicaltheory.princeton.edu. Questions and comments can be directed to: polthry@princeton.edu.

Department of unintended consequences

Bicycle locks endangering health of McGill’s most vulnerable trees

The tree in question, a 10-year-old magnolia acuminata, stands in front of the Macdonald-Harrington Building. It’s not much to look at, standing barely 10 feet tall, with a few spindly branches at its uppermost reaches – branches that carry fewer and fewer leaves in the summer months.
The tree, a protected species in North America and the only one of its kind on McGill’s lower campus, is dying. And it’s not dying of disease or as a result of an infestation of some exotic bug. Ironically, it’s being killed by cyclists.
With the greening of lower campus, more people are riding their bikes to McGill and the extra two-wheel traffic means crowded bike racks. The University is in the process of doubling the number of bike racks on lower campus from 1,200 to 2,4000. Nevertheless, some cyclists insist on chaining their rides to anything that doesn’t move, including fences, signposts, wheelchair access ramps – and small trees.
The problem with the latter is twofold. First, the constant rubbing and banging of locks, chains, pedals and pointy derailleurs cut into the protective bark, leaving the tree susceptible to disease, fungi and insects. It also impairs the flow of sap, which usually runs just below he surface of the bark.
Second, the relentless traffic of people and bikes at the base of the tree tamps down the soil, compacting it and making it more difficult for the roots to absorb water – another hindrance to the healthy flow of sap.
With its vital supply line of sap in an increasingly compromised state, the magnolia tree is literally withering to the point where its trunk at bike level is significantly thinner than it is higher up the tree (see photo). It is slowly strangling to death.
“This tree has almost stopped growing,” said Champagne. “It should be twice as large as it is now. And it’s a shame because in Canada this is a fairly rare tree.”
The situation is compounded because cyclists are locking their bikes to smaller trees all around campus, including just inside the Milton Gates. As a result, a generation of smaller, less robust trees is increasingly at risk of developing serious problems.

Gee, I wonder why bicycles are being inappropriately and excessively crowded just inside the Milton Gates?

Compare and contrast

Does Canada lack global ambition?

"We don’t have enough time on task, we don’t have enough days in the year, we don’t have enough hours in the day. We don’t have enough emphasis on science and math. We don’t have a high enough standard for literacy, an encouragement for people to be literate and numerate when they graduate. The people [teachers] who perform the most precious job in our society and economy are not rewarded for success nor punished for failure.

So mediocrity is protected and excellence is not rewarded. At the university level, I think we have high quality institutions but again I would say that we tend to be very constrained by collective agreements. Fewer and fewer days in the year are actually spent teaching."

University considers cutting semesters from 13 weeks to 12
SSMU VP Abaki pushes for the change, arguing that McGill students work harder than their peers

The McGill administration is currently considering a number of changes to the university's academic calendar, including a proposal to shorten the lengths of the fall and winter semesters by reducing the number of hours students are in contact with their professors.

Standard McGill classes currently give students three hours of contact with instructors per week for 13 weeks, for a total of 39 hours per semester. The proposal, which is being considered by the Working Group on Calendars and Dates, a subgroup of McGill Senate's Committee on Enrolment and Student Affairs, would reduce the required number of contact hours to 36 per semester.

Students' Society Vice-President University Affairs Joshua Abaki has pushed for the changes, arguing that McGill students must work harder than their peers at other universities. According to Abaki, McGill is the only member of the G-13—a group of research-focused universities in Canada—that requires 39 hours.

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It may be of interest here to note that McGill's faculties are not unionized.

Concerning the astonishing student complaint that they are getting too much teaching for their dollar, it is perhaps also worth noting that in-province tuition for Quebec universities is far lower than equivalent tuition is at other G13 universities.

"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value." Thomas Paine.

Earmarks

The idea is rapidly spreading that a ban on earmarks doesn't affect spending, since earmarks are a way of distributing what's already been appropriated.

This is just true enough to be clever, and marks the speaker as being more sophisticated than those Tea Party rubes. But it's basically false, for three reasons.

First, it is more expensive to do things inefficiently than to do things efficiently. Building the Ted Stevens Bridge To Nowhere or the Robert Byrd Gold-Plated NORAD Auxiliary High Command Of West Virginia means that money has simply been wasted, and that all the needs that weren't met this year will arise again next year. If the real needs exert at least some pull on appropriations levels, then wasting money rather than spending it wisely at time 1 does affect appropriations at time 2. The U.S. gets very bad value per dollar of federal infrastructure spending, in part because earmarks screw up the ability to prioritize projects. That doesn't increase the appropriations at time 1; but it does tend to drive them up in every later year. Similarly, when earmarks keep alive weapons systems that the Pentagon wants to cancel, because the defense appropriators in Congress view the defense budget as a jobs program, the Pentagon shrugs its shoulders and increase its request the following year; it's not going to let the wasteful jobs-program part of the budget displace its own military priorities.

Second, bills often emerge out of House-Senate committees with higher appropriations levels that have the express aim of smoothing passage with earmarks.

But third, and most important: the earmarking members of Congress are the same people who set the appropriations level. And by this I don't only mean that they're members of the House and Senate; I mean that they're powerful members of the relevant committees. Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd took turns chairing the Senate Appropriations Committee. The knowledge that they were going to have a chance to start shoveling pork a little bit later in the process affected how much they appropriated at the beginning.

The idea that earmarks don't affect spending levels rests on a crazy image of how appropriations levels are set. We don't have one set of legislators who are dispassionate, disinterested judges of how much money needs to be allocated, who are then later on replaced by a bunch of grubby politicos deciding how to divvy up the spoils. Neither do we have legislators who, during their initial appropriations deliberations, somehow forget that earmarking comes later. Instead, we have normal human legislators throughout, responding to their incentives and environment. It would take a kind of saintly self-denial for them not to increase the initial size of the pool knowing that they were going to get a chance to give themselves a share later on.

Republican earmark supporters have been saying that abolishing earmarks transfers allocation authority to the dreaded Obama Administration. Well, yes. And if you tell a bunch of Republican legislators to decide how much money to give to the Obama administration to allocate, they'll come up with a smaller number than if you tell them to come up with an amount for them to divide up among themselves to allocate. Indeed the same holds true for members of the President's own party.

Earmarks aren't themselves a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, and abolishing them entirely would only make a tiny dent in the deficit. But they do indeed affect appropriations-- and my hunch is that they affect appropriations for more than their actual cash value, because they create a system that attracts appropriators like Byrd and Stevens, who err on the side of spending too much to make sure there's enough to go around.