A Real Death Panel

December 3, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

The death panel is not Obama’s. It’s in a state dominated byRepublicans – the governorship and a 2-1 majority in both houses.

Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients . . . .

Francisco Felix, 32, a father of four who has hepatitis C and is in need of a liver, received news a few weeks ago that a family friend was dying and wanted to donate her liver to him. But the budget cuts meant he no longer qualified for a state-financed transplant.

He was prepared anyway at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center as his relatives scrambled to raise the needed $200,000. When the money did not come through, the liver went to someone else on the transplant list.

Full story on page one of today’s New York Times (online here).

Performativity?

December 2, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

They didn’t have performativity back when I went to school, so I don’t really know what it is. Is this an example?

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Full article here.

Via Brad DeLong, and all over the blogosphere today, even though it’s originally from 1974.

Citizen Kanye

December 1, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I wish I knew more about the economics of the music business.

At first glance, it looks like Kanye West’s decision to sell his new album for $3.99* at Amazon is putting pride ahead of profit. Zach Baron at the Village Voice says that Kanye did it only because of the swift sales success of another album, “Speak Now,” by, oh, what was her name? You know, that one at the VMA.

There’s money, and there’s competitive, striving megalomania. (I can’t believe I am the first person to come up with the pun in the subject line of this post. But if someone else did put it out there, Google’s algorithm places it far down on the list.) In some areas, striving and ego go together like a horse and carriage. At the financial houses (Goldman Sachs, et. al.), they say that those multi-million dollar bonuses are not about the money and what it buys. The dollars are just a way of keeping score. You want a $20 million bonus because the guy at the next desk got $18 million.

But apparently, in the music business, at least for the top stars, what you keep score with is not dollars but sales, regardless of the economics.

the rush toward ever lower pricing . . . pushes the consumer cost of an album ever closer to that terrifying price point: free. Nobody in the industry wants that, let alone a guy poised to sell something in the neighborhood of a million records over the next week.

It’s like the old joke about the businessman who has cut his price so low that he’s losing $2 on every item he sells. When asked how he can do that, he says, “We’ll make it up in volume.”

I guess Kanye’s beautiful, dark, twisted response would be, “We’ll make it up in ego.”


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* Now, after the first week surge, the download price has gone up to $4.99.




HT: Tyler Cowen for the link to the Voice.

Searching for Consistency

November 30, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Our department secretary flew to California last week. She said that the security lines at JFK zipped right along. Neither she nor her husband nor any of the other travelers minded the new search procedure, nor did it cause any delays. Why then did the media give so much coverage to the TSA and its antagonists during Thanksgiving week?

Pure politics. All the fuss is coming from the right. But as Ross Douthat said in his New YorkTimes column on Monday, if George W. Bush had been in office when the scanner policy came down, the same people who are whining about Big Government violating the Constitution and trampling on Privacy and Freedom would be draping the scanning machines in Old Glory.

Here’s an example of reaction on the right.

(Click on the image for a slightly larger view.)

Had Bush been President,* Drudge would have been saying that only terrorists and their allies would want to resist the TSA. And the photo would show not a nun but Osama bin Laden or the Shoe Bomber.

Douthat also guesses that liberals would have opposed the new scan and grope procedures if Bush were President. Possibly, but they certainly wouldn’t have made as much noise about it. Even now, lefty bloggers are not extolling the TSA as the thin line keeping Al Qaeda bombs from our planes. And Obama and Napolitano sound conciliatory (“Sorry, folks, but we have to do this”) rather than patriotic, pugnacious, or protective in the GOP style (“Which is worse, being patted down or blown up? Take your pick.”)

The right and left also divide over who should be searched. Conservatives favor racial profiling; liberals oppose it. But racial profiling too raises the problem of political consistency – not all by itself, but when it sits down next to Affirmative Action. As Elvin Lim wrote in Faster Times (the day before Douthat’s column in the slower Times),

It seems, then, that one can either be for race-based profiling and affirmative action, or against both. What is problematic is if one is for one but not the other.

But doctrinaire liberals and conservatives split their preferences – for one and against the other.

My guess is that most liberals are for race-based affirmative action but against racial profiling, and most conservatives are against race-based affirmative action but for racial profiling.

Lim also thinks that the consistency problem is thornier for conservatives.

For the conservative who is against race-based affirmative action but for profiling, the problem is stickier. Almost every anti-affirmative action argument I have come across turns on the principle of formal equality: that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong, no matter what the policy intentions may be. [Lim’s italics]

Greater equality and opportunity is a policy intention, so is air safety. If you’re a conservative and, like Steven Colbert, you don’t see color, if you’re for color-blind hiring and college admissions, then you should be for color-blind everything, including airport screening.

Another part of the conservative dilemma might be that conservatives have a lower tolerance for ambiguity. They prefer “moral clarity” – adherence to a simple principle. So while in practice they will hold tight to their inconsistent positions on racial profiling and affirmative action, they’ll have a harder time dealing with the cognitive dissonance.

* In fact, Bush was President when the photo Drudge used was taken. It’s from 2007. But it was of a nun being patted down, and I guess Drudge found it just too good to pass up. (See here.)