Sometimes you read a Tyler Cowen post and you think to yourself, simply: Did he really just say that? Here’s Cowen on payday loans and unprotected sex:

The unprotected sex is riskier and less prudent than borrowing money at an annualized rate of two hundred percent.  Why prohibit one and not the other? Many of the borrowers are being fooled, but others have legitimate reasons to seek the money, such as wanting to buy a birthday present for a visit to one’s child, living with a separated spouse.

On a prima facie level, I think it’s fairly obvious that making love to a woman (or a man) is not like taking out a high interest loan from a payday loan boutique. There are a lot of ways I can think that sex differs from 200% APR loans…but the way that counts here is basically a category issue. In short: loving making is not a market transaction.

For one, you shouldn’t assume that your consensual partner is pursuing a profit or pleasure maximizing strategy. Some partners might be, but they’re the exceptions that prove the rule. For the most part, lovers are couple-regarding: they’re interested in maximizing the pleasure of both parties, not themselves alone, and especially not one at the expense of another.

That’s obviously not true of payday lenders, whose very business model depends on the suffering of their clients. They exploit information asymmetries and pray on the people least able to make good decisions, in order to maximize their revenue. With sex, risk is a byproduct of something otherwise wholesome and demonstrably positive sum; with payday lending, one party’s suffering is a core feature of the larger system it exists within.

This whole rather ridiculous debate speaks to a larger issue with economics as an analytical tool. The fact is, transaction models are not the appropriate metaphor for love, or love-making, or friendship, or any of that. No matter how many books Cowen writes, that still will be true. The very fact that danger incurred by one partner in unprotected sex is shared by the danger incurred by the other, in a roughly symmetrical way, indicates the larger point that sex between men and women / men and men / women and women is consensual and other-regarding in a way that buying something from a firm can never be. To capture the essence of that non-utility maximizing connectivity — that Oneness, as some might call it — you need to get very far away from economics, towards something like art or religion.

Maybe the best way to end this is to just quote at length from Mark Greif’s piece On Repressive Sentimentalism, from N+1. (Harvard Magazine’s take on the journal here, if you’re unfamiliar). To me, this piece is deeply flawed in a number of ways, but he’s dead right when he says the following. Note, this gets us very far away from payday loans…but that’s sort of the whole point, isn’t it?

You have to defend sex because we still have no better model than the actual, concrete sexual relation for a deep intuitive process opposed to domination. We have no better model for a bodily process that, fundamentally, is free and universal. It does not produce (there is no experiential remainder but pleasure) nor consume. It is cooperative (within the relation of the lovers) and, in that relation, seems to forbid competition. It makes you love people, and accept the look and difference of their bodies. Production comes back in with pregnancy and “labor”—that’s why contraception means so much. Competition can come back in with the conquest of partners, and a brutality or technical objectivity in lovemaking that allows men to remake cooperation as if it were struggle—hence utopians’ funny, sentimental insistence on love in the act. Sexual cooperation is the other side of our basic human nature, and matches and disarms economic competition….

“Sex without consequences” becomes the metaphor for cooperative exchange without gain or loss. For basing life on the things that are free. For the anticapitalist experience par excellence.

Photo credit: Katu

Recent Harvard Law graduate Joel Pollak, running for Congress against Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), has invoked Steve Biko, the martyred South African anti-apartheid activist, in defense of Andrew Breitbart, the amoral media commentator who recently went after an innocent civil servant in order to advance his race-baiting political agenda.

According to Pollak, Breitbart embodies Biko’s “simple credo”: “I write what I like.”

Those are five inspiring words in the context of a protest against a tyrannical government, but when one likes to write false, manipulative things, as Breitbart does, I dare to suggest they are somewhat less noble.

Of course, Pollak thinks that Breitbart (and Pollak himself) are protesting against a tyrannical government: that of the Democrats in Washington. Says Pollak:

Last week, my opponent, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), called on me to denounce Andrew Breitbart and to end any further association with his website, BigGovernment.com.

Her attack was typical of a corrupt Washington elite that believes it is entitled to tell people what to say and where to say it.

So, you see, calling on a political opponent to renounce his association with a craven liar is tantamount to silencing the protests of an oppressed minority group.

One wonders how Pollak fared in Constitutional Law at Harvard. See how he cleverly interprets Schakowsky’s challenge (she is telling people “what to say and where to say it”) to suggest that she is threatening Pollak’s freedom of speech? Pollak then gets on his high horse: “The First Amendment is not a perk for members of Congress and their spouses.”

But it’s no violation of the First Amendment to criticize a person’s writings and associations. Schakowsky wasn’t suggesting that, if Pollak continued to contribute to Breitbart’s website, she’d move to have the website shut down. She was simply suggesting that the voters would punish him. And, judging from the make-up of the Illinois 9th, she’s probably right.

I guess when you’re running against an incumbent who won her last election with 75% of the vote, you need to do anything you can to stand out. Apparently, for Pollak, this includes throwing out everything he learned (or didn’t) in law school.

In quoting Biko’s admirable maxim, Pollak isn’t being a freedom fighter. He’s being a child.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

This post was originally published on the blog of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

In their desperation to cut losses in the 2010 midterms, Democrats are relying ever more heavily on their message that Republicans care nothing about the poor. The GOP, we are told, has opposed tax relief for working class families, subsidized health insurance for those who can’t afford it, and extended unemployment benefits for people who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, all while siding with wealthy banking executives in the Democratic dichotomy between “Wall Street” and “Main Street.”

Conveniently absent from this analysis is Republican opposition to President Obama’s cigarette tax increase, which he signed into law a couple of weeks after taking office. Thanks to this tax hike, which included a 159 percent increase—from 39 cents to $1.01—in the excise tax per pack of cigarettes, the Office of Management and Budget reports that tobacco tax receipts are up $5.2 billion, or 68 percent, from $7.6 billion in fiscal year 2008 to $12.8 billion in fiscal year 2009.

While higher cigarette taxes discourage smoking, they are highly regressive. Analyzing a slightly less severe proposal in 2007, the Tax Foundation noted that “no other tax hurts the poor more than the cigarette tax,” pointing out that the burden of such a tax hike would be 37 times heavier on the lowest-earning 20 percent of households than would be an equivalent income tax increase. This amounts to a 25 percent reduction in the Earned Income Tax Credit, assuming the poorest citizens share the new tax burden equally.

But they don’t—smokers and those involved in the tobacco industry shoulder the entire cost. Perhaps even more disturbing is that the law was passed as part of the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009, which uses the tax increase in part to finance an expansion of SCHIP benefits for children of households earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, and even higher income levels in New York and New Jersey. As the Tax Foundation observed in its 2007 analysis, 49 percent of the population is within 300 percent of the poverty line, meaning a tax that falls heaviest on a fraction of the poor is financing an extension of medical coverage for middle class children.

The latest manifestation of this “corrective” tax agenda is the so-called “tanning tax.” Little noticed amid the coverage of taxes on “Cadillac” health plans in Obamacare was the bill’s 10 percent surcharge on the use of ultraviolet indoor tanning beds, which took effect earlier this month. The Washington Post reports a dramatic decline in business at a local tanning salon. Most salons are small businesses owned and staffed by women. Moreover, as John Overstreet of the Indoor Tanning Association explained in an interview, the industry’s customers are primarily women in their twenties and thirties who do not have a great deal of disposable income. While excessive tanning has been shown to cause skin cancer, it can be used in moderation as a treatment for psoriasis and other medical conditions for which the law makes no exception.

As if the effects of these taxes weren’t bad enough, they are in direct violation of Barack Obama’s campaign promise that “no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.” Tell that to a minimum wage worker who smokes a pack a day, or the owner of a tanning salon who now has to lay off employees. These rate hikes, which are permanent unlike the payroll tax rebates in the stimulus, were enacted without any apparent regard for their redistributive implications in an effort to punish citizens committing the health sin du jour. Democrats have used the tax code to bring smokers and tanners to justice. Who’s next? Soda drinkers?

Ross Douthat has a wonderful way of casually saying things that you don’t hear many conservatives say. For instance, his statement on Monday that “the note of white grievance” that Pat Buchanan struck in a 2000 speech at Harvard is now “part of the conservative melody.” Wow, a prominent conservative who acknowledges that politics in the Obama era involves an aspect of “white grievance.” For that kind of thing alone, Douthat earns his space in the New York Times.

Unfortunately, the rest of his column tries to make out “what Pat Buchanan got right” with his accusation that liberal America discriminates against white Christians. Douthat cites a Princeton study of eight elite colleges, showing that low-income whites are disadvantaged in the admissions process.

For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

This leads Douthat to conclude:

The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions.

That sounds about right to me. I would guess that working-class white Christians from conservative states and regions are under-represented at Harvard, i.e. they make up a smaller proportion of the Harvard student body than of the United States population.

But in the second half of his column, Douthat tries to make a lot of hay out of this. He says, “Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.”

But remember that the Princeton study was of eight elite schools. If we assume that only alumni of very selective schools go into law, philanthropy, finance, academia, media, and the arts, then Douthat’s “inevitable” conclusion might hold. But might not graduates of disproportionately white and working-class schools also go into these fields? Or is it that Douthat has in mind a certain type of law firm, financial firm, media organization, etc.? Is the New York Times probably a little deficient in the white, working-class, red-state demographic? Yes, probably. Same goes for Teach for America, Morgan Stanley, and Cravath, Swaine & Moore. But what about “law,” “finance,” and “media” generally? We don’t really know.

My point is that Douthat is trying to make a general argument about American society based on the proclivities of a very narrow sliver of the educational elite. Or maybe all I’m really getting at is, like Tim Fernholz, I wonder how many white, working-class, red-state Christians Douthat knows. This part of the column seems to be based on Douthat’s impressions of Harvard, which, while interesting to me, probably don’t have much salience for most Americans.

Then, on the basis of the fact that Harvard doesn’t have many Southern Baptists, Douthat proclaims that there is a “cultural divide” between, well, the stereotypical red American and the stereotypical blue American. Again, this kind of Brooksian commentary is fair as far as it goes. Yes, there’s a cultural divide. No, it probably doesn’t help that elite colleges don’t admit many “aspiring farmers.” (Though I have to say, there might be reasons other than culture for an aspiring farmer to go to Texas A&M rather than Harvard.)

But what really gets me is how Douthat creates a false equivalence between the two sides of this cultural divide. The Right fears that “Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth,” while the Left fears “crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs.” The problem, of course, is that the former set of fears has absolutely no basis in reality, whereas the latter, even if sometimes exaggerated, does.

As Steve Benen notes:

Just this year, John Patrick Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon; Joe Stack flew an airplane into a building; Jerry Kane Jr. and his son killed two police officers in Arkansas; and the Hutaree Militia terrorist plot was uncovered. Last year, James von Brunn opened fire at the Holocaust memorial museum; Richard Poplawski gunned down three police officers in Pittsburgh, in part because he feared the non-existent “Obama gun ban”; and Dr. George Tiller was assassinated. In 2008, Jim David Adkisson opened fire in a Unitarian church in Tennessee, in part because of his “hatred of the liberal movement.”

And today we read:

Convicted felon Byron Williams loaded up his mother’s Toyota Tundra with guns, strapped on his body armor and headed to San Francisco late Saturday night with one thing in mind: to kill workers at the American Civil Liberties Union and an environmental foundation, prosecutors say.

I really hate how we keep coming back to this subject. But the reason we do, it seems to me, is because conservatives like Douthat, ashamed of the radicals that the label “conservative” has come to be identified with, keep trying to argue, in essence, that liberals have the same problem. But they don’t. And if there was anything like the Tea Party Movement on the left, talking about violent revolution etc., I guarantee you Democratic politicians would stay very far away. (Or, imagine that the Tea Party was black.)

If you want to bridge the cultural divide, I think it’s more important to address the festering swamp of paranoia and hatred being fed by Fox News and the likes of Andrew Breitbart, than it is to get Harvard’s admissions officers to admit a few more farmers.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of JoinRick

HuffPo is reporting that Tim Geithner has expressed opposition to Elizabeth Warren’s nomination to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a department that she helped create.

The article isn’t sourced well — it comes from an unnamed “source with knowledge of Geithner’s views” — and in response to the report Michael Barr, Assistant Treasury Secretary and one of the leads on the Financial Regulation reform, has said on the record that “I think Elizabeth is absolutely terrific…I believe and Secretary Geithner believes that she’s exceptionally well-qualified to run it.”

Whatever the reality is, however, it’s worth pointing out that Elizabeth Warren really would be a superb choice — and not because there aren’t other talented bureaucrats to pick, but because there aren’t others quite so visibly talented, quite so publicly forceful.

In issues of governance, visibility matters. It’s not just about having a fighter, but knowing that you have a one, that counts.

Representative democracy works on trust between citizens and their elected officials: we vote them in and then basically trust them to defend our interests as we return our focus to the tasks of our daily lives. We have newspapers and watchdog groups to help us overcome the knowledge gap between us and our government, but that gap is always there; even the most engaged citizen must acknowledge that on any given issue his information and time resources are limited; that there are dozens of complex factors at play; and that perceived failure — like an insufficiently small stimulus package; a health care reform bill without a public option; a financial regulation regime without clear capital cushions; a bailout that solidified the power of the Wall Street incumbents; the persistence of Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, and so on — might be either a failure of will or of competence on the part of our leaders, or it might be, otherwise, a failure on his part to understand the complexity of the issue at hand — or a combination of both.

Like banks, governments are characterized by “moral hazard”: the people making the choices aren’t the ones living with their consequences.

Any honest liberal is forced to ask, of the Obama administration: How hard are they pushing? Are the administration’s shortcomings failures of will? or are they they best policies possible, given the constraints of the moment? The answer is somewhere in between, of course. But where? We have to analyze the facts and make our judgments and make our arguments, but it’s never possible to know exactly: how hard are they pushing?

Thus, the benefit of having a fighter in the administration is the benefit of trust; you know that there’s a fight going on at the top. In the case of Elizabeth Warren, you know her position in that fight. You can trust that a given outcome in a given case was pursued in good faith, and hard won. There might be a dozen reasons for failure, but it wasn’t — you know — a failure of will.

And in a democracy, that trust is a very good thing to have.

Photo credit: CNN

Recent headlines are not encouraging for Democrats facing midterm elections this November.  Based on polling, the National Journal wrote 7/3 that Democrats can expect to lose four to six seats in the Senate, and it is not inconceivable that they might lose the majority.  The House numbers also threaten the majority.

Conservatives like Rand Paul are a gift, not a threat, to congressional Democrats.

Voter anger is strong.  Far-right populism, typified by the tea party, is proving its inconsistent but game-changing influence by ousting moderate Republicans from GOP primaries in favor of grass-roots favorites.  See Rand Paul (R) hoping to fill Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R) Kentucky seat after Bunning retires and Sharron Angle (R) taking on Sen. Harry Reid (D) in Nevada.

But neither Rand Paul nor Sharron Angle should worry the Democrats.  Yes, polls show them both winning against the Democrats.  But both, simply by being so far to the right (and, in their case, inexperienced on the national stage), are preferable opponents in a general election.  Angle’s primary win was a gasp of fresh air to an embattled Harry Reid.  Her primary opponents were poised to make mincemeat of the Senate Majority Leader, but against Angle, Reid’s race is winnable, if competitive.

No, Democrats need not worry that the tea party is stealing their base and turning independents and center-leftists into creative-conservatives.  What Democrats need to worry about is that their base will stay home. Read More…

Last week, Peyton argued that, “If the goal of policy is full employment, there are likely much better ways to accomplish this than unemployment insurance, and the drawbacks of this program [to extend UI benefits] are not to be rejected out of hand.” As he accurately points out, “The debate among economists is not about whether unemployment benefits generate additional unemployment, but the extent to which they do.”

But Peyton ignores a key distinction that needs to be made between strong and weak labor markets. What do you think is stopping us from reaching full employment (heck, I’d settle for Clinton-era unemployment numbers) right now? Is it likely to be laziness, or is it likely to be the massive recession we’re haltingly emerging from? Now, if we were in the midst of boom years, and unemployment was at 4 or 5 percent, you might justifiably say to the long-term unemployed, “Hey, everybody else is doing it, so go get a job. It can’t be that bad out there.” And lowering or canceling their benefits after a certain point might be the kick in the rear that those people needed.

But in a terrible job market, with five applicants for every opening, people aren’t unemployed because they’re lazy; they’re unemployed because there aren’t very many jobs available. Taking away their unemployment benefits will make them a little more eager to find a job, willing to settle for a little less than they would have. And for that reason it might, taken in isolation, have a modest salutary effect on the unemployment rate. But it’s going to have a massive negative impact on millions of people who were already just barely getting by.

So now we get to the issue of whether the Republican line on unemployment benefits is an “insult” to the unemployed, as Nancy Pelosi claimed, earning Peyton’s chagrin. Here I think we need to make another important distinction: yes, taking away benefits will make people marginally more likely to find work, but those people are likely to think (almost always with good cause) that they’ve been trying to find work all along. Those two things aren’t inconsistent. The vast majority of the unemployed have been trying to find work; taking away their benefits will make them a little more desperate to do so. But to suggest that they haven’t been trying at all—that’s the insult.

Have Republicans been doing that? As one prominent Republican might say, you betcha!

(From Steve Benen)

Sharron Angle, the extremist Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, considers the unemployed “spoiled .” One GOP congressman recently compared the unemployed to “hobos.” In the House, GOP lawmakers tried to eliminate a successful jobs program. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) actually started pushing a measure to require the unemployed to take mandatory drug tests in exchange for benefits. Kentucky’s Rand Paul wants the jobless to quit their bellyaching and “get back to work.”

And the Republican candidate for the PA Senate seat said recently, “The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there.”

Imagine how that sounds from the perspective of the average unemployed American. You’re getting about $300 a week to take care of your family. You’ve gone to jobs fairs, you’ve scoured the Internet, you’ve set your sights lower than you hoped to. And still nothing.

And now the minority party has prevented an up-or-down vote from taking place to extend your benefits. The money is going to dry up, and it’s sink or swim for you. But you know what? It’s for your own good, because you’ve been lazy, and this is exactly what you need to get you off the couch.

Again, it might be perfectly true that you’ll be a little more motivated to find work. I grant that that’s true. But it’s still insulting to talk like this to real Americans who have struggled and are struggling.

On top of all that, consider everything else we know. Like the fact that the Senate’s biggest opponent of the lazy unemployed, Jim Bunning, voted for extending unemployment benefits in 2003. Which was the year before he and a Republican president came up for re-election. Just saying.

Or how about the fact that extending benefits would have added $35 billion to the debt, versus the $678 billion that would be added by continuing the Bush tax cuts? Yet Jon Kyl, the second-ranking Senate Republican, thinks you “never” should have to offset a tax cut; only increased spending requires a budgetary offset. Their concern for the deficit, the purported reason why Republicans are canceling Americans’ unemployment benefits, turns out to be phony? Yes, I think that’s insulting.

Now, about the other part of this problem: Is it true that extending benefits is not just the humane, but also the most unemployment-reducing thing to do? Peyton says it is “at least plausible that unemployment insurance generates greater demand for workers,” but he’ll have to do better than that. Unemployment benefits are the second-most stimulative policy, right behind that other handout to the idle poor, food stamps.

Tax cuts, which are Peyton’s preferred policy, do well too. They’re a good stimulus, and it’s economically intuitive why they would be: they put money in people’s pockets, which people go out and spend, creating demand for more workers to meet the increased consumer demand. That’s probably why Obama’s stimulus was one-third tax cuts.

So, to sum up, Peyton is absolutely right that, if you want full employment, you don’t want to have very generous unemployment benefits. You can only get full employment in a strong economy, and in those circumstances, generous benefits are more likely to encourage people who could otherwise be employed to stay home and collect. (Note that a lot depends on how generous those benefits are; I hardly consider $300 a week generous.) But in any case, the goal of policy isn’t to reach full employment, at least not now. The goal is to bring down the unemployment rate and mitigate Americans’ financial hardships. Extending unemployment benefits would do both.

A similar post originally appeared on the blog of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Arizona’s controversial immigration law, S.B. 1070, which enforces federal immigration law at the state level. Whereas the outcry in the national media has focused on the legislation’s racial implications, the Obama administration contests the law largely on the grounds that, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a South American interviewer, “the federal government should be determining immigration policy.” The Justice Department complaint points out that “[i]n our constitutional system, the federal government has preeminent authority to regulate immigration matters.” True enough, but the idea that the Obama administration is motivated by a desire to uphold federal sovereignty in the realm of immigration policy is hard to swallow.

U.S. law prohibits public universities from providing in-state tuition rates for illegal immigrant students, yet ten states currently allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition. Numerous “sanctuary cities” deliberately subvert federal immigration policy by preventing local law enforcement and other officials from inquiring as to the immigration status of residents. Some have gone even further by providing undocumented immigrants with local forms of identification.

President Obama immediately voiced opposition to the Arizona law, which enforces federal law at the state level, but has made no rhetorical or legal challenge to state laws that work against federal immigration policy. Such pro-illegal immigrant practices existed well before January 2009, but Obama did not campaign on the need to abolish them for the sake of restoring immigration policy to the federal domain. In fact, when asked in a presidential debate whether he would “allow [sanctuary] cities to ignore the federal law regarding the reporting of illegal immigrants,” he refused to condemn sanctuary cities, commenting only briefly on the need for “comprehensive immigration reform.”

The notion that immigration policy should be handled at the federal level is a legitimate one, but it is difficult for the Obama administration to oppose Arizona’s law on these grounds since it has not lifted a finger in opposition to state-level policies that favor illegal immigrants. A different agenda is at work here.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia.

In a press conference late last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi addressed legislation before the House to extend unemployment benefits until November 30. Asked if the extension would serve as a “disincentive for people to look for work,” Pelosi dismissed the argument as a “misrepresentation of the motivation for people to be on unemployment insurance” and an “insult to the working people of our country.”

What the speaker calls an insult is a basic principle of economics acknowledged by top officials in the Obama administration. Federal unemployment insurance provides temporary payments to workers who become unemployed through no fault of their own and meet certain other eligibility requirements. While this eases the pain of workers who are laid off, it also increases the unemployment rate. Former Harvard University president Larry Summers, whom President Obama appointed to head the National Economic Council, has explained that such programs contribute to long-term unemployment by providing people with “an incentive, and the means, not to work.” Unemployment benefits, in other words, amount to a subsidy for people who have lost their jobs to remain out of work, enabling and encouraging them to delay finding another job.

The debate among economists is not about whether unemployment benefits generate additional unemployment, but the extent to which they do. Summers cites his and Kim B. Clark’s 1979 study estimating that the existence of unemployment insurance almost doubles the number of unemployment spells lasting more than three months. More recently, University of Chicago economist Bruce D. Meyer found that generous unemployment insurance has “a strong negative effect on the probability of leaving unemployment,” meaning the more people are paid to remain without a job, the longer they do so. He determined that a ten percent increase in the “replacement ratio,” or benefits divided by after-tax income received while employed, increases the length of unemployment spells by roughly 1.5 weeks. He also found that recipients are dramatically more likely to get another job just prior to when their benefits run out.

In 2006, Peter Kuhn and Chris Riddell of the National Bureau of Economic Research compared unemployment insurance regimes in environmentally and demographically similar regions of neighboring Maine and New Brunswick from 1940 to 1991. The Canadian province had dramatically higher long-term unemployment over this period, which the authors largely attribute to Canada’s more generous benefits.

Speaker Pelosi also claimed that unemployment insurance is a “job creator” because it “injects demand into the economy.” By this logic, since people without jobs are more likely to spend what money they have, more generous unemployment benefits lead to greater demand for goods and services, and thus more jobs. While it’s at least plausible that unemployment insurance generates greater demand for workers, the notion that such a program leads to more people working seems to be undermined by empirical evidence. The same Summers and Clark study estimates that if the program were eliminated, the unemployment rate would drop by more than half a percentage point. This is particularly significant given that less than half of the unemployed receive benefits since many do not qualify.

Pelosi is correct that unemployment insurance “helps people who’ve lost their jobs,” but her claim that it “creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name” is misleading inasmuch as empirical evidence indicates that it increases unemployment. Government can create jobs, as Pelosi clearly understands, by expanding the public sector; it can also empower private firms to do so by reducing taxes and regulation. Neither of these avenues entails the adverse incentives of paying people not to work. If the goal of policy is full employment, there are likely much better ways to accomplish this than unemployment insurance, and the drawbacks of this program are not to be rejected out of hand.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia.

Earlier this week, Jeff Kalmus responded to Will Rafey’s post “China in the Lead,” in which Rafey argues that China is poised to overtake the U.S. and “seize control of the emerging clean energy economy” (Max Novendstern weighs in here and Rafey responds here). Jeff weighs in to argue that it doesn’t particularly matter if China innovates more rapidly than the US. Rather, Jeff writes, the concept of a “clean energy race” with China is “an attempt by environmentalists to argue for action on climate change in terms they expect to be better received than the fundamental environmental justifications, but terms which are ultimately unconvincing.” Instead, he writes, “environmental activists should stick to what they know best, the widely agreed-upon science and consequences of climate change.”

I’m only quasi-weighing in on this discussion, since I’ll be addressing the above segment of Kalmus’ post rather than the main thrust of the discussion. The question is, should environmentalists stick to facts of climate science in making their case?

I say no—in addition to the “race with China” theme, there is great merit to looking at climate change as a national security issue more broadly. Invoking “national security” is likely to stir listeners in a way that climate science just can’t.

Currently, there are two main themes in shift to considering environmental action a national security priority. One is that as global warming continues, it will lead to growing resource wars, massive displacement of refugees, and an exacerbation of extremism-breeding poverty. This view received a huge amount of media attention following the release a 2005 study from the Center for Naval Analyses, and if you browse around the main national security and general policy think tanks (a common activity for HPR writers), you can find reports from most all of them considering the strategic and security implications of climate change. It’s a sexy topic.

More immediately, talking heads decry our dependence on foreign oil as an immediate threat to our security, a trend that originated in the 1973 oil crisis, and received new urgency in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It’s now a well-worn talking point from right and left alike:

McCain on the campaign trail: Clean energy is “a national security issue when we’re dependent on more than $400 billion a year in imported oil from countries that don’t like us very much … some of that money is helping terrorist organizations.”

Al Gore on the NYT op-ed page: Even if man-made global warming were not actually occurring,

We would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil.

Barack Obama in the BP speech: (he also uses the “China race” theme)

Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil….I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy -– because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.

And so on. My purpose here is not to re-make the case for clean energy—enough ink has been spilled on that already. But in considering why making the case from a national security perspective can appeal to more voters, consider Dan Gilbert’s fantastic speech at Harvard Thinks Big. Because of the way our brains evolved, argues Gilbert, humans respond much more quickly and ferociously to threats that are intentional, immoral, imminent, and instantaneous, than those are not. In a memorable line, he declares that “If climate change were some kind of nefarious plot by bad, bad men with worse mustaches, right now we would be fighting a war on warming.”

That’s why it may help to rally people around clean energy by showing them pictures of Ahmadinejad instead of charts of atmospheric temperatures.

Bonus quote:

My favorite example of “foreign oil” outrage: Bob Dylan in “Slow Train,” the title song from his 1979 album Slow Train Coming—his first album after his born-again conversion to Christianity. His not-so-politically-correct rhymes reflect a nationalist indignation you’d be hard pressed to find elsewhere in his work:

All that foreign oil controlling American soil
Look around you, it’s just bound to make you embarrassed
Sheiks walking around like kings, wearing fancy jewels and nose rings
Deciding America’s future from Amsterdam and to Paris
And there’s slow, slow train coming up around the bend.

Slow train indeed.