Month: June 2022

This is the Louvre as viewed from the left bank of the Seine. I like this view because it forces me to see the Louvre not as a museum, but as a royal palace, which it was intermittently for three centuries before Louis XIV finally abandoned it for good when he moved to Versailles.

Ironically, although Versailles has a reputation for hugeness, the Louvre is more than three times bigger. The grounds of Versailles, at 2,000 acres, are the largest of any royal residence in the world, but it has only about 700,000 square feet of floor space, which doesn't even rank it in the top ten in Europe. (It's #11.)

In the Washington Monthly, Paul Glastris writes about regulation and monopolies:

Federal regulation is not a hindrance to freedom or prosperity but bulwarks of both. Unfortunately, [in the early '80s], leaders of both parties adopted a contrary set of ideas, dubbed “neoliberalism”: that deregulating markets was the key to economic growth.

Wait. The Monthly is opposed to neoliberalism? They practically invented neoliberalism—though perhaps of a different variety than the one Paul is criticizing. Neoliberalism has so many definitions these days that it's all but impossible to know what people mean when they use the word.

That said, I've never been quite able to join in the progressive revulsion toward neoliberalism. Sure, it went overboard in some places, especially banking, but then there's this:

During the period from 1950-1985 world GDP increased $4,000 on a per capita basis adjusted for inflation. In the following 35 years world GDP increased nearly $8,000.

That's about the same on a percentage basis. But it's twice as much on a dollar basis and it shows more signs of exponential growth than the earlier period—even though the immediate postwar era was famously one of high growth. But starting from a much higher base and without a lot of catchup growth built in, world GDP still grew more strongly under a neoliberal regime. I wonder if it could have done that otherwise.

There are nuances to consider. A big part of recent economic growth has been due to just China and India, which are hardly neoliberal poster children. And the housing bubble and subsequent banking crash of 2008 can plausibly be laid at the feet of deregulation.

For these reasons I'm not an unrestrained booster of neoliberalism. But I still suspect it did more good than harm.

Also, while I'm not a big fan of monopolies, I don't think they have anything to do with our current bout of inflation, which is both temporary and caused by unique factors. For example, an unprecedented global pandemic. But who knows? I'll read Phil Longman's cover story and maybe he'll convince me. He's done it before.

Supreme Court liberals have been caught in public recently praising their conservative brethren. This has provoked the ire of many progressives, who are convinced they must be idiots, but I'd like to propose a radical alternative: the justices might be lying in order to form good relationships with conservatives.

Why? Because when you're in a 6-3 minority you can't do anything unless you manage to persuade a couple of conservatives to vote with you. And it's a lot easier to do that if you make nice internally and praise them externally.

Just a thought.

How is our mental health doing? It's gotten a lot of attention in these post (?) COVID days, some of it based on this Gallup poll from a few months ago:

The line to look at is the "excellent/good" line at the top, and it unquestionably dipped during the height of the pandemic. At the same time, it's now only four points below its pre-pandemic level, which isn't a huge amount. I'd say we came through pretty well.

But the crosstabs are interesting:

Women and 18-34 olds started out low and declined as much as everyone else. Put those two categories together and they spell "mothers," who have probably taken the biggest hit from the pandemic.

Religion sure helped during the pandemic. Before COVID, churchgoers and abstainers both felt the same. But during the pandemic churchgoers remained stable while abstainers plummeted.

It's also remarkable how much better Republicans feel compared to Democrats. Before COVID they registered a remarkable 26 points higher than Democrats. That went down during the pandemic, but even now they clock in 14 points higher. Why? Is it related to moral certitude? The excitement of a big battle? A happiness born of not feeling responsible for people outside your family? Higher average incomes? Anybody have any other ideas?

Tonight I find common bond with the conservative movement in the US on a development that's a threat to all of us. I speak, of course, about QR-code menus in restaurants:

QR-code menus are annoying, but not exactly the greatest civilizational threat of our time. But there’s a serious aspect of this, too: They not only represent a holdover from a pandemic era that we should be leaving in the rearview as expeditiously as possible — they also are another concession to the digitization of American life, replacing the world of the physical and material with an emaciated, online substitute. For that reason, and so many others, we should demand a return to the real thing. Nothing less than physical plastic menus will do.

I'll add this: not only do online menus suck because they're hard to read on a cell phone, but like most technological "improvements" they only work when they're in the right mood. I calculate, based on extensive research, that they operate properly only 64.3% of the time.¹ That's not nearly good enough.

Note that I am fully supportive of online menus in general. They're a great tool for checking out a restaurant beforehand to see if they offer the kind of food your group will like. I just don't want them at the restaurant.

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, I know that restaurants will give you a paper menu if you ask for one. But for how long?

ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT: Before I get a round of "OK Boomer" from the young 'uns, a word of warning: eventually your eyes will deteriorate too and cell phones won't be the delightful experience they are now. Even with bifocals.

On second thought, by the time you're 60 medical science will probably be able to provide you with bionic eyes. Damn.

¹This is a joke. But it does roughly represent my personal experience based on maybe a dozen usages.

The Guttmacher Institute recently reported a rise in the abortion rate. It's the second recent increase, following one in 2019:

In addition, the absolute number of abortions increased; the abortion/pregnancy ratio increased; and this happened in every region of the country.

Why? It's all guesswork at this point, but there are a few theories:

• It's just a bit of noise.
• Decreasing lead levels reduced impulsive teen behavior, causing the abortion rate to go down over the long term. However, this doesn't entirely fit the data. Teen birth rates went down starting in the early '90s, which fits the lead theory. But the abortion rate started to decline in the early '80s. In any case, it hardly matters since we're now at a point where lead is a non-factor. It has no influence over small ups and downs in recent years.
• Conservatives have made contraceptives harder to get, which leads to more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions. Maybe, but there's little evidence for either (a) reduced access to contraceptives (the data is hard to get and always out of date) or (b) the belief that reduced access to contraceptives leads to more abortions in the first place. In fact, there's some evidence that more difficult access to contraceptives leads to less sex and therefore fewer abortions.
• Mifepristone/misoprostol (the "abortion pills") has become more widely available, which makes it easier and more convenient to get an abortion.
  .
  
• The data for 2020 should be ignored, just like all other pandemic-era data. We still have no handle on what really happened with people during the pandemic.

Basically, this is just a mystery. For now, I'd keep an open mind and wait another few years for more data.

DATA NOTE: The Guttmacher data from 1973-2017 is here. The data from 2017-2020 is linked here. CDC data for teen birth rates is here.

UPDATE: In the fourth bullet I initially referred to Plan B, which is a contraceptive known as the "morning after pill." I meant to refer to mifepristone/misoprostol, which is an abortifacient that has become much more widely used over the past decade. I've corrected the text and added a chart.

Here's a tidbit of interesting news that I missed last week: liberals are breathing a sigh of relief because the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the government in American Hospital Association v. Becerra.

Liberals were anticipating this ruling with trepidation. The issue in question was related to the way Medicare reimburses hospitals for certain prescription drugs, and by itself it's not hugely important. But the bigger issue was how much deference courts should give the government when it enacts a specific policy in the face of vague statutory language.

Here's the thing: the Supreme Court ruled—unanimously!—against the government, which is exactly the outcome liberals feared. Without substantial good-faith scope to interpret enormously complex modern laws, the gears of government would grind to a halt.

So why are liberals content with losing this case? Because the ruling merely overturns the Medicare reimbursement policy and says nothing about the larger issue of deference to agency decisions.¹ This suggests that the Court—including conservatives as well as liberals—is not entirely on board with gutting the current rules on deference.

So what happens next? A unanimous decision written by a conservative suggests there's some horsetrading that needs to be worked out before a more expansive ruling is made. This in turn suggests that the current rules are likely to be pared back a bit, but the Court's members are still negotiating the exact terms. Or, perhaps, that the Court's conservatives have cold feet about upending the operation of the entire government and are willing to keep the current rules mostly in place but are trying to get something from liberals in return.

That's my guess, anyway. I suspect the current rules might get tweaked a bit, but are basically fairly safe. This is one of those cases (unlike, say, abortion) where the extremist conservative view just doesn't look so good, even to conservatives, when they have to really and truly consider the wild chaos that would result from a bright line ruling. The world looks different when you move from sloganeering to reality.

¹You'll hear the current rules referred to as "Chevron deference" because they were laid out in the 1984 case Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council.

I don't have anything substantive to say here, but WTF Uvalde police department? Are they seriously trying to prohibit access to bodycam video and other evidence related to their recent school shooting because . . . well, Jason Koebler of Vice tells us what they're saying:

The city and its police department want to be exempted from releasing a wide variety of records in part because it is being sued, in part because some of the records could include “highly embarrassing information,” in part because some of the information is “not of legitimate concern to the public,” in part because the information could reveal “methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime,” in part because some of the information may cause or may "regard … emotional/mental distress," and in part because its response to the shooting is being investigated by the Texas Rangers, the FBI, and the Uvalde County District Attorney.

Is there any reason that the attorney general of Texas should give this the time of day? "Highly embarrassing information" is about the worst possible reason to withhold public information.¹ "Methods and techniques" is almost deliberately contemptuous considering that nobody in their right mind would ever study and follow the disastrous conduct of the Uvalde police department. And "mental distress"? Really? I think the Uvalde police have already managed to max this out. It's hardly a good reason for withholding information anyway.

I swear I'd think this was a joke if it weren't down in black and white in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. If he cares about either the law or public opinion even slightly, he'll return this letter instantly with "DENIED" stamped all over it.

¹Actually, this is by far the most common reason for withholding information from the public. But nobody ever says it. I don't know what the Uvalde attorneys were thinking.

The LA Times has an op-ed by Lex Rivers today with this title:

Why is it so hard to get healthcare as a trans cancer patient?

Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to endure as a trans cancer patient. The abusive treatment I have experienced makes clear how having cancer and being trans are stigmatized in our healthcare system.

Rivers, who lives in the Bay Area, was diagnosed with a rare eye cancer at age 26:

Panic at the “C” word barred me from access to transition-related care. Once they learned I had cancer, some providers suggested discontinuing my hormones without offering any medical justification to explain how this would support my health. One provider told me I needed to start taking antidepressants because I was “emotional” and that if I did not, they would stop prescribing my hormone therapy. As a result, I was coerced into taking psychiatric medication I did not want.

....The discomfort and hostility came from not just doctors, but also nurses and other health professionals who participated in my care, such as technicians for my MRI and CT scans. The dehumanizing discrimination I dealt with included having my clothes tugged and being told I was dressing inappropriately for wearing a skirt.

It is really and truly not my goal to minimize Rivers's experience, but once she makes this public it's fair to offer criticism. And I have a problem with it: Rivers never really demonstrates that she suffered "abusive" treatment or anything close to it. Let's run it down:

• Within the trans medical community, some doctors suggested she discontinue hormones "without offering any medical justification." Maybe so. But as a cancer patient myself, I'm keenly aware that doctors are sensitive to how little we know about chemotherapy and how it affects different people. Suggesting a conservative approach to the intersection of two big, whole-body therapies—chemo and hormones—isn't uncommon. Sometimes there are things that have to be put on hold until chemo is over.
• Another doctor suggested antidepressants. I have no idea if this was justified in Rivers's case. But again, it's a very common suggestion for cancer patients, who unsurprisingly suffer from high rates of depression.
• During her cancer treatment, her clothes were tugged. And one time she was told she had dressed inappropriately for wearing a skirt. This doesn't really make sense and as written it sounds almost frivolous. What's the bigger story here?

I wouldn't write about this if I disagreed with some of it but didn't think it caused any harm. But I'm afraid it might. As written, this piece uses sweepingly radical language—abusive, dehumanizing, hostile, stigmatized, structural violence—to describe things that seem pretty ordinary to anyone who's gone through cancer treatment. I've had doctors refuse to prescribe sleeping meds even though they know that corticosteroids (dexamethasone in my case) play hob with sleep. I've had doctors who recommended demanding lifestyle and diet changes that I later learned were entirely unnecessary. I've become weepy and emotional and ended up taking antidepressants. I've had my treatments changed with no warning. I've become blindingly angry over some of the ways I was treated—sometimes justified, other times, in retrospect, an overreaction caused by the fatigue of chemo and poor sleep.

Needless to say, I'm male, white, cis, hetero, middle class, conventionally abled, and pretty much everything else society codes as normal.

In a lot of ways, the medical system sucks. In other ways it's great. Eventually I found a doctor who had sensible ideas about how to treat steroid-induced insomnia. Nurses clued me in on how best to deal with pharmacies. My current oncologist has been completely supportive and helpful about getting me onto the waiting list for CAR-T treatments. I continue to take antidepressants because that turned out to be a good idea.

In other words, Rivers's essay describes a lot of stuff that might not be related to her trans status at all. Without better evidence of abusive treatment and stigmatizing attitudes, this comes across as routine irritation about medical care that's been lightly overhauled in the service of trans activism. Aside from lefties who are eager to believe it regardless, I suspect most people will come away from this essay thinking that trans people are just willing to complain about anything. That doesn't help anyone.

I was cleaning out some old folders over the weekend and came across this picture of a white rose. It had a bit of a yellow cast in the center that I didn't like, but when I opened Photoshop to remove it I accidentally ended up changing it instead. I was quite taken with this pinkish-salmon color, so I went ahead and kept it.

Long story short, this is not a flower found in nature. But I still like it.