Reason Magazine - Staff

Kidneys for Sale

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

“What can Iran teach us about good governance?” is not a question often posed in Washington. But according to Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist in North Carolina, the Iranians have managed to do something American policy makers have long thought impossible: They’ve found kidneys for every single citizen in need.

As Hippen explains in a March report for the Cato Institute, the Iranian government has been paying kidney donors since 1988. To avoid potential conflicts of interest, donors and recipients work through an independent organization known as the Dialysis and Transplant Patient Association. Donors approach the association on their own; they cannot be recruited by physicians or referred by brokers with financial incentives. They receive $1,200 and limited health coverage from the government, in addition to direct remuneration from the recipient—or, if the recipient is impoverished, from one of several charitable organizations. The combination of charitable and governmental payments ensures that poor recipients are treated as well as wealthy ones.

Critics of organ markets often claim that where payments are permitted, altruistic donation will drop off. Hippen found this is not the case in Iran. The country’s deceased donor program, started in 2000, has grown steadily alongside paid donation. (Posthumous donations are not remunerated.) During the last eight years, deceased donations have increased tenfold.

Data on the long-term health of Iranian kidney doors is mixed and inconclusive, so Hippen recommends that any U.S. system closely track donors and provide them with lifelong health care. Since many potential kidney recipients are currently surviving on vastly more expensive dialysis treatment (paid for by Medicare), providing donors with long-term health care is probably more cost-effective than the status quo.

American critics continue to lament that Iran failed to adopt the U.S. policy of banning payment for organs in the mid-1980s. “Carrying this reasoning to its conclusion,” writes Hippen, “would entail admitting that in so doing, Iran would have also incurred our current shortage of organs, our waiting list mortality, and our consequent moral complicity in generating a state of affairs that sustains an international market in illegal organ trafficking.” No other country has managed to eliminate its kidney waiting list; the U.S. has a list 73,000 patients long. Who should be advising whom?

Collectivist Genes

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Are bullying, haranguing, collectivists just expressing adaptive evolutionary behavior? A new paper in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B suggests that when societies are hostile to individualism, sexual selection may be to blame.

Jumping off a growing body of research linking cultural traits to disease risk, the study’s lead author, University of New Mexico biologist Corey L. Fincher, hypothesizes that collectivist behaviors evolved to protect populations from illness. Both ethnocentricism, which discourages contact with disease-carrying outsiders, and conformity, which encourages the transmission of risk-averse behaviors, can serve as buffers against disease. Individualism may be adaptive in that it encourages innovation, but safe, wary behavior could prove more important where pathogens are prevalent.

Fincher and his three co-authors compared data on individualist vs. collectivist values across the globe with data on historical and contemporary measures of disease transmission. Controlling for other factors that may cause cultures to become more individualistic, such as income and urbanization, the researchers found that “worldwide variation in pathogen prevalence substantially predicted societal tendencies toward individualism/collectivism.” In other words, societies living in regions where infectious diseases historically have posed the biggest threats were most likely to discourage individualism. Societies most open to contact with outsiders live in regions where such contact poses the least threat of infection.

The correlation doesn’t explain how these behaviors are passed along through generations. Transmission may be cultural, as with methods of food preparation that guard against infection, or heritable, as a selection process weeds out anti-collectivist tendencies. Either way, the effect is likely to weaken as medicine reduces the risk of infection—good news for individualists, or anyone who dares stray from the tribe.

On Not Pissing Off Than Shwe

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:20:00 EDT

Anne Applebaum, David Cameron, and others are calling for the rest of the world to ignore the junta and just start blanketing the country with aid from the air. It's certainly tempting; orphaned kids are getting sick as planeloads of medication wait a short trip away, and it's ludicrous that anyone should have to ask a bunch of barely educated thugs permission to deliver food and water. Still, its probably wishful thinking to envision a happy middle ground between submissively awaiting permission and full scale humanitarian intervention. No one has good enough information to know where, exactly, to dump a bunch of pallets, and Oxfam appears to think an air drop would make matters worse:

Air dropping aid does not guarantee food and other relief supplies reach the people most in need. In many cases it's the strongest and fittest who get to the aid first and not the sick or injured who most need help and assistance. In a natural disaster such as Cyclone Nargis or conflict like Dar-fur it's not only food that's needed but also sophisticated equipment such as clean water and sanitation systems weighing tonnes as well as highly skilled staff to operate them, all which cannot be dropped from the sky.

“If there isn't an aid operation on the ground to distribute the aid the air-drops can exacerbate any tense relations within communities with only the fittest and fastest benefiting,” said Brian Scott.

While I doubt that sprinkling the delta with a bunch of high-energy biscuits is going to hurt cyclone victims in the short term, there is reason to worry about the junta's response to what it will call "invasion by Western Imperialists." Burma is isolated, but it is no North Korea; there is ample room for the generals to become more insular by cutting off Internet access and throwing all foreign workers out of the country.

This is a country that's always in crisis, and at any given time, dozens of well-funded foreign NGOs are operating within Burma. The United Nations Children's Fund, WorldVision, and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency have big aid operations, and Doctors Without Borders has a longstanding program that distributes anti-malarial drugs in remote regions. A military that will steal food from hungry people won't hesitate to rid itself of foreign doctors, teachers, and agronomists, and that's going to leave a lot of people much worse off. At the very least, the junta will respond by banning all authorized aid, which means that the teams waiting outside Burma now will never make their way over the border and on the ground.

I Want My MRTV

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:19:00 EDT

The list of things the Burmese government has bungled over the past two weeks includes its own propaganda campaign:

AS HUNDREDS of thousands of refugees waited for emergency relief yesterday and for their leaders to act, the Burmese junta went ahead with a national referendum aimed at keeping its members in power.
The Burmese generals were visible all right. State television showed them handing out boxes of the small amount of aid allowed in from neighbouring Thailand. Unwittingly, it also showed that the Burmese leadership had plastered their own names over the true origins of the food aid to fool their own people into believing that the emergency relief supplies had come from them.

I'd rather consider this the work of a disgruntled MRTV employee. Endless MRTV-3 segments featuring officials shaking hands in celebration of their bang-up job on cyclone relief are here and here.

Meanwhile, the government is holding a vote on its 194-page constitution, available only in languages 40 percent of the population cannot read. According to the New York Times, officials have pushed cyclone refugees out of schoolhouses in order to use them as polling places. In this, too, the regime has managed to gum up its message machine. The country's "roadmap to democracy" is widely regarded as Than Shwe's attempt to soften criticism of his government, and the constitutional referendum is probably a ploy for international legitimacy in response to pressure from the region. It...doesn't seem to be working at the moment.

Sin Tax Creep

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:45:00 EDT

Led by the state’s Sierra Club, New Mexico’s “No Child Left Inside” movement aims to provide school kids with a variety of outdoor education programs. Since the fund will need money, environmental groups are looking to taxpayers for support. And since public health programs are increasingly funded through sin taxes, states have gone fishing for a sin.

Instead of piling on the usual culprits, alcohol and tobacco, the coalition wants to impose a 1 percent tax on television sets and video games, agents of vice that presumably leave children inside. (Other politicians want to use such gimmicks to require kids to stay inside. In December a Wisconsin state senator proposed a video game tax to fund a juvenile detention program.)

Supporters of the proposed New Mexico tax say it will raise $4 million, which would go toward busing students to state parks and training teachers to integrate outdoor learning into their lesson plans. The boost in visitor numbers would be conveniently timed for state parks, where attendance has been waning nationwide. Kids are a captive audience during school hours, which means they’re available to boost meager attendance numbers—and park budgets. Prying them from their video games after hours, though, will be a tougher sell.

Data: Arrivals Down, Panic Up

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

A new report from the Immigration Policy Center reminds us that immigrant arrivals have been down since well before the current eruption of nativist sentiment. The annual flow of immigrants to the United States was at its height in 2000. The Census Bureau and Social Security Administration predict it will continue to decline until at least 2015.

According to the study’s author, University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers, “proponents of the negative story of the immigrant future have ignored this recent leveling and decline. Instead, they have averaged data from the last 12 to 14 years and concluded that immigration is continuing at record levels.” Myers notes that the flow to gateway states like California is way down. Immigrants are instead heading straight to places such as Missouri and the Carolinas, where they’re finding jobs and forming small communities.

White House Correspondence: The Great Forgetting

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:21:00 EDT

How hard is it to save your emails? The Bush administration seems to have underestimated the challenge. Tim Lee explains:

When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The transition broke compatibility with the old archiving system, and the White House IT shop did not immediately have a new one to put in its place.
Instead, the White House has instituted a comically primitive system called "journaling," in which (to quote from a recent Congressional report) "a White House staffer or contractor would collect from a 'journal' e-mail folder in the Microsoft Exchange system copies of e-mails sent and received by White House employees." These would be manually named and saved as ".pst" files on White House servers.
Due to the lack of a reliable archiving scheme, thousands of e-mails appear to have been lost, perhaps irretrievably. A 2005 analysis performed by McDevitt (while he was still on the White House Staff) found over 700 days with e-mails apparently missing from the "journaling" archives, including 12 days in which all e-mails from the president's immediate office were missing, and 16 days when all e-mails from the Vice President's office were missing. The White House Office of Administration has estimated that between 2003 and 2005, at least five million e-mails have been lost. Some of those may be recoverable from backup tapes, but in the absence of adequate logging features, there is no way to be sure all of the e-mails have been recovered.

Federal law requires the preservation of White House emails concerning official business, but senior officials don't seem terribly concerned. Lots more here.

A Very Special Episode of Red Eye

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:50:00 EDT

Red Eye's 300th episode, God help us, airs tonight at 3am EST. Come to watch me, stay to watch Chuck Schumer's niece.

Kennedy Legacy Reduced to Sad Comic Strip

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:20:00 EDT

Remember Michael Skakel? Nephew of Ethel Kennedy, killer of Martha Moxley, exemplar of the stupid grandson theory? As the AP helpfully explains in between descriptions of Moxley's demise, he is working on an art project. Behold his moral vision:

Skakel, convicted in 2002 of killing Martha Moxley in 1975, participates in a program that lets inmates show another side to their lives. His drawing of his 9-year-old son George will be among those on public display starting Thursday at Capital Community College in Hartford.

The drawing shows the boy wearing a T-shirt that reads “love” and surrounded by colorful animals. A nearby skeleton with sunglasses symbolizes death, but two doves overhead depict triumph over death, said Jeffrey Greene, manager of Community Partners in Action, the nonprofit group that runs the program.

An eyeball in the sky symbolizes God watching over the boy, but a lamb is shown next to a lion.

Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, is serving 20 years to life for bludgeoning Moxley to death with a golf club in wealthy Greenwich. He maintains that he is innocent.

In another piece, Skakel drew a comic strip about the loss of innocence. A young boy wants to play football, but his friends are not home. Then he runs into someone who gives him marijuana to smoke.

Blame Paris

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:50:00 EDT

In a recent review of A.K. Sandoval-Strausz' Hotels: A History, I discussed the moral panic hotels provoked in the 19th century, catering as they did to rootless transients and licentious women. I thought we were kind of over it, but the Falls Church New-Press informs me otherwise:

Parents and supporters of the St. James Catholic middle school packed the Falls Church City Council chambers at City Hall Monday night to plead to the F.C. Planning Commission that it not approve a proposed Hilton Garden Inn hotel adjacent the school in the block of W. Broad St.
Strident speakers Monday warned the Planning Commission of “the likelihood of inappropriate conduct between adults and children” due to the “transient nature” of hotel patrons. They also cited traffic congestion issues, noting that “car crashes are the number one killer of children under 14.” One said that N. Oak St. would become “a mini-mixing bowl.”
Concerns were expressed of “hotel rooms being used in crimes against children,” and laws cited in some jurisdictions across the U.S. prohibiting registered sex offenders from living near a school.
Judy Meehan, a victim’s rights advocate, said it was “disgraceful” that the City did not begin consideration of the project “with a concept of risk.” The City has been “negligent,” she said.
“The connection between crime and hotels is well known,” Meehan said, suggesting the heightened instances of prostitution and rape “in and around hotels.”

[Many thanks to reader Brian Nichols for the link.]

"We're Not Drug Dealing, We're Selling Curry"

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:43:00 EDT

Britain is phasing into a points-based immigration system that heavily favors educated workers, leaving unskilled workers from outside the European Union with no legal way in. Officials say unskilled jobs can be filled by Europeans, but Polish immigrants aren't doing much for the struggling curry business:

Thousands of curry restaurant workers gathered in London yesterday to demand that the government relaxes new immigration rules to avert a financial catastrophe caused by crippling staff shortages in the £3.5bn industry.
As demonstrators carrying placards demanding "Save Currynomics" surrounded the base of Nelson's Column, Muzammil Ali, who has run the Jewel in the Crown curry house in Swindon for 21 years, said he lacked skilled and unskilled workers. "This law will make staff shortages a very big problem for us," he said.
Shabul Muhth said his two restaurants in Kent had been raided at around 6.30pm on Friday and Saturday nights, the peak time for his business. Around 18 uniformed officers arrived on each occasion and closed the restaurant, he said.
"They didn't find anything but it spoilt business for those nights." No action was taken against the restaurant, he added. Muhth said he would not mind if raids were conducted on quiet nights, such as Sundays and Mondays, and officers came in plain clothes and "spoke nicely" to staff. "Come in like a gentleman," he said. "We're not drug dealing, we're selling curry."

The obvious government response would be to award more points to South Asians skilled in the culinary arts. But other industries will complain of shortages, and that leaves the government constantly monitoring every aspect of the economy in an attempt to predict the supply of labor. Australia updates its points system every six months; in April of 2007 it was trying to address a chronic shortage of hairdressers.

The currynomics update comes via Swati Pandey.

Art for the Nation State's Sake

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:50:00 EDT

Does it make any sense for the modern government of Peru to demand the return of Incan artifacts? The director of the Art Institute of Chicago doesn't think so:

Government serves the interest of those in power. Once in power, with control over territory, governments breed loyalty among their citizens, often by promoting a particular identity and history. National culture – language and religion, patterns of behavior, dress and artistic production – is at once the means and manifestation of such beliefs, identity and loyalty, and serves to reinforce governments in power.
Governments can use antiquities – artifacts of cultures no longer extant and in every way different from the culture of the modern nation – to serve the government’s purpose. They attach identity with an extinct culture that only happened to have shared more or less the same stretch of the earth’s geography. The reason behind such claims is power.
At the core of my argument against nationalist retentionist cultural property laws – those calling for the retention of cultural property within the jurisdiction of the nation state – is their basis in nationalist-identity politics and implications for inhibiting our regard for the rich diversity of the world’s culture as common legacy. They conspire against our appreciation of the nature of culture as an overlapping, dynamic force for uniting rather than dividing humankind. They reinforce the dangerous tendency to divide the world into irreconcilable sectarian or tribal entities.

The whole thing is well worth reading, as is Steven Vincent's 2005 reason story on cultural patrimony and the international antiquities trade.

Russell Pearce: American Hero

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:03:00 EDT

Rep. Russell Pearce, the excitable Arizona legislator who called McCain's immigration bill "treasonous," has a new idea:

Arizona public schools would be barred from any teachings considered counter to democracy or Western civilization under a proposal endorsed Wednesday by a legislative panel.
Additionally, the measure would prohibit students of the state's universities and community colleges from forming groups based in whole or part on the race of their members, such as the Black Business Students Association at Arizona State University or Native Americans United at Northern Arizona University. Those groups would be forbidden from operating on campus.
Pearce, a Mesa Republican, said his target isn't diversity instruction, but schools that use taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate students in what he characterized as anti-American or seditious thinking..
SB 1108 states, "A primary purpose of public education is to inculcate values of American citizenship. Public tax dollars used in public schools should not be used to denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization."

Which values count as American, you ask? Let's consult Rep. John Kavanaugh:

"This bill basically says, 'You're here. Adopt American values,' " said Kavanagh, a Fountain Hills Republican. "If you want a different culture, then fine, go back to that culture."

Well, that clears things up. Obviously, this proposal comes packaged as an amendment to a "homeland security" bill.

Hat Tip: Kip Esquire.

Maoist Village Embraces GMOs

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:20:00 EDT

The Chinese village of Nanjie is a half-socialist holdout where "villagers still lead a collective life as they did decades ago, sing revolutionary songs and chant Mao slogans every day." It appears to be much more prosperous than its market-oriented neighbors; this 1999 New York Times article notes the "spacious, well-equipped schools" and free vacations for model workers. Alas:

While the rest of the country abandoned the commune, pursued personal fortunes and dismantled state industries, the village of Nanjie in central China renationalised its land, set up factories and paid all residents £20 a month. Advertising was banned and instead, propaganda banners hung in streets which led to a 30ft statue of Mao built in 1993.

Unfortunately, few of the visitors were accountants. In the past two months, newspapers in Hong Kong and Guangzhou have unravelled a tale of Enron-style woe.

The village's triumphs were built on £120 million of secret loans from the Agricultural Bank of China, which is now calling in its loans as it prepares to list its shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange. According to one report, the bank had been instructed to support Nanjie at all costs by a conservative in the Communist Party leadership after the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square prοtests in 1989.

According to the Asia Times, the bureaucrat forcing the bank to make the loans has retired, and the new boss is less excited about funding a Maoist amusement park. The bank wants the loans repaid, and Nanjie seems, at least, to be trying:

To reduce its debts, companies run by the village have in recent years turned to marketing a soybean seed in the name of Spaceflight II. They claimed that after the seeds were sent out into space their genes underwent a mutation that would increase their harvest by 30%.

Walls of Paper

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

“There is a smart way to protect our borders, and there is a dumb way to protect our borders,” Hillary Clinton explained at a February debate in Austin. Obama agreed. The smart way, he added, involves “deploying effective technology.” The “dumb” way, which both Obama and Clinton voted for, involves building a hideous steel barrier on land taken from inconveniently situated Texans.

Thus has advanced our immigration debate since the great failure of comprehensive reform in 2007. Walls are for neanderthals. Civilized people do not try to keep poor, entrepreneurial, much-needed workers out of the country with bricks and mortar; rather, they achieve this through the use of technology. On this, all three prospective presidential candidates agree. Each supports an expanded employment verification program, which would involve a hugely expensive surveillance apparatus and bureaucracy in order to monitor the employment choices of every American and foreign national. What an appalled ACLU calls “a permission slip to work” has come to represent the middle ground, though it’s likely to be far more devastating than any fence.

A bill known as the SAVE Act (Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007) represents an extreme version of this fantasy, a barrier built of paper and databases rather than mere concrete. The bill’s co-sponsors, Democrat Heath Shuler and Republican Tom Tancredo, are currently attempting to force a vote on the issue by collecting signatures for a discharge petition. If they succeed, they’ll force reluctant legislators into the awkward position of voting on an unworkable bill that seems, at first glance, a reasonable attempt to enforce the law.

Fewer than one percent of American employers currently use the E-verify system, which checks the immigration status of American and foreign workers against imperfect federal databases. By all accounts, the Social Security Administration is struggling under this burden; SAVE would increase the number of users by around 13000 percent (pdf). Every employer would be forced to send information about every potential hire, citizen or otherwise, to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which would send the information on to the Social Security Administration, which would send the information back to USCIS. In cases where either agency finds a discrepancy, USCIS will issue a “temporary non-confirmation” that the worker can in theory contest within eight days. Given the 4.1 percent error rate of the SSA database, millions of legal workers may have to fight for the right to accept a job. According to the agency, 17.8 million of its records contain discrepancies, and most of those pertain to citizens.

Employers are not supposed to act when presented with a “temporary non-confirmation”; they’re supposed to relay information to employees, allow employees to contest the finding, and wait for another response from DHS. But the costs of E-verify are significant even when it functions properly, and waiting around while potential hires wrestle with data snags is even costlier. From the perspective of an employer with a bunch of interchangeable potential hires, it's most efficient to simply run everyone through the system and fail to hire people with problematic records. Pre-employment screening is illegal, but a study commissioned by the DHS last year found that nearly half of participating employers were ignoring at least some mandated worker protections.

While undocumented workers probably contribute more in federal taxes than they consume in federal services, no one doubts that they pose some fiscal burden to border communities where they arrive. Still, you’d have to take an improbably extreme view of these costs to deem the SAVE Act fiscally rational. According to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf), the act would decrease federal revenues by $17.3 billion between 2009 and 2018 as formerly tax-paying workers go underground. The costs of expanding E-verify and a bunch of other goodies stuffed into SAVE (thousands more border agents, a program to recruit former members of the armed forces to join the border patrol, more SUVs and unmanned aerial vehicles, hundreds of full time immigration investigators, expanded immigration detention centers) come to $23.4 billion in discretionary spending during the same period. And that doesn’t touch the cost to individual employers, who are being slapped with a huge regulatory burden in the midst of impending recession.

No presidential candidate has come out in favor of Schuler’s bill, most likely because the bill includes no avenue for undocumented workers who wish to become legal. Herein lies the ambitious stupidity of SAVE: If the bill works as intended, it will instantly turn the population of 12 million undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal into 12 million unemployed undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal. For a political constituency constantly worried about “anarchy,” this does not appear to be an ideal situation.

The SAVE Act may or may not come to a vote this session, but employment verification will almost certainly be a part of future compromise legislation on immigration reform. That's worrying. Walls offend us aesthetically and symbolically; they’re clumsy and primitive and cruel. But they’re also easy to tear down; far easier than a slowly metastasizing system of total employment surveillance, of growing databases and expanding bureaucracies.

In the end, E-verify will not “turn off the tap,” “dry up the pool of jobs,” or “turn off the magnet.” It will simply encourage workers underground, where they will be more vulnerable to abuse and less likely to pay taxes. But SAVE’s supporters may be doing more than they know to slow the flow of willing workers into the United States. Rises and falls in the flow of undocumented immigrants do not track enforcement efforts; they track the state of the U.S. economy. If legislators manage to quicken the onset of recession by reducing the flexibility of American employers, draining billions in tax revenue, and preventing Americans from going to work, they'll get exactly what they've been wishing for.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of reason.

Reason on Red Eye

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:12:00 EDT

I'll be on tonight with "body language expert" Janine Driver and the hilarious Michelle Collins. The show starts at 3am EST on FNC.

Legends of the Fall

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:10:00 EDT

The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten has a fun piece on the pleasures, perils, and social conventions of elevator travel:

Ask a vertical-transportation-industry professional to recall an episode of an elevator in free fall—the cab plummeting in the shaftway, frayed rope ends trailing in the dark—and he will say that he can think of only one. That would be the Empire State Building incident of 1945, in which a B-25 bomber pilot made a wrong turn in the fog and crashed into the seventy-ninth floor, snapping the hoist and safety cables of two elevators. Both of them plunged to the bottom of the shaft. One of them fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman aboard—an elevator operator...

Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete. And the elevator is energy-efficient—the counterweight does a great deal of the work, and the new systems these days regenerate electricity. The elevator is a hybrid, by design.

Sadly, fans of verticality are not welcome in DC.

Via Alex Massie.

Boom Times for Sellers of $600 Toilet Seats

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:05:00 EDT

As you're preparing the details of your financial life for inspection, consider the Pentagon's accounting skills:

The basic defense budget for 2007 was $439.3 billion, up 48 percent from 2001, excluding the vast additional sums appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to federal regulators and current and former Pentagon officials, the accounting process is so obsolete and error prone that it's virtually impossible to tell where much of this money ends up. While the department's brass has made a few patchwork improvements, billions are still unaccounted for. The problem is so deeply rooted that, 18 years after Congress required major federal agencies to be audited, the Pentagon still can't be...
Until the Pentagon can get its records in order, no comprehensive audit is required. Instead, the department writes each year to the inspector general certifying that "material amounts" in its financial reports can't be substantiated.

That it can't be audited "goes to the heart of the department's credibility," says Dov Zakheim, who was Defense Department chief financial officer and comptroller under Rumsfeld. "Nobody would trust even a half-million-dollar enterprise if its books weren't clean."

The Pentagon has repeatedly assured Congress that it is working toward an audit. Yet the projected date continues to slip further away. In 1995, Pentagon officials testified that it could be audited by 2000. In 2006, an audit wasn't envisioned until 2016.

That's from a Portfolio piece called "The Pentagon's $1 Trillion Problem." Veronique de Rugy's fantastic May cover story -- "The Trillion-Dollar War" -- will make you just as excited to pay your taxes.

"Our Flag is Hip Hop"

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

At the beginning of the documentary Planet B-Boy, as several hip-hop veterans offer a breezy history of breakdance, a not-to-be-messed-with French street dancer describes a transformational filmic experience. “Flashdance,” he says, and pauses to hold back tears, “It’s personally emotional for me.” A Japanese b-boy, recalling his first viewing of the film, is reduced to “wow.” An earnest German promoter confirms that the 1983 film, which includes scenes with the breakdance pioneers Rock Steady Crew, had pan-European influence. In bringing an urban American art form to Seoul, Paris, and Capetown, Flashdance planted the seeds of a subculture all over the map. Jennifer Beals, apparently, is an effective conduit for the culture of the South Bronx.

The term b-boy identifies hip-hop-obsessed dancers who have devoted themselves to breakdancing. Today, that word holds currency in a number of languages, and Benson Lee’s Planet B-Boy follows French, Japanese, Korean and American dance crews from their home countries to a global competition in Braunshweig, Germany. Whereas The Freshest Kids, another recent documentary on b-boy culture, located the history and early evolution of breakdancing in the black and Puerto Rican communities of the South Bronx, Lee is less interested in where that culture came from than where it has gone. New York figures only as a dusty museum for the form’s history.

Instead of New York’s Rock Steady Crew, then, we meet Phase-T, a crew from the working class suburb of Chelles, France. The crew includes nine solid French North Africans and one tiny white kid dubbed “Lil’ Kev,” a freakishly talented dancer whom they toss around like a beach ball. Sitting beside her son, Lil’ Kev’s mother explains what she first thought of his new friends in hip-hop: “noir, noir, noir!” As he cringes beneath a cocked baseball cap, she explains that she’s not as racist anymore, and she no longer fears his friends or his chosen life trajectory. But she and her husband would be “very proud” if he decided to be a fireman instead.

Battle of the Year, the competition that grounds the film, forces a post-national phenomenon into a nationalized framework. Preliminary competitions take place at the country level, so each team bears the responsibility of representing its respective country. Phase-T is a team of chiefly African descent that has mastered an American art form to perform under a French flag. As charming a story of globalization as that might be, there is something profoundly incongruous about performing as anti-authoritarian and expressive an art as breakdancing under any flag at all. That tension emerges throughout the film, as b-boys alternately embrace the competitive playbook handed them and struggle under its weight. “We can’t say the phrase ‘French culture’ really represents us,” says one of Phase-T’s dancers. “Our flag is hip-hop.”

Cho Sung Gook knows something about national pride; his disapproving, working class father works as a flag distributor for the Korean government “to help establish our national identity.” And for Cho's crew, Last for One, the burdens of national identity are something like a ticking clock. Each will have to serve Korea’s required two years of military service, and like any athletes at the top of their form, they won’t be able to simply pick up where they left off. “You lose everything you work for when you go to the army,” explains a crew member, “so we have to take it to the extreme before we go.”

The crew feels dismissed and ignored by mainstream Korea, by parents who think they are “cleaning the floor or something” when they’re handspringing through subways. And given their living conditions—six to a room in Seoul—cleaning floors might seem a safer financial strategy than hoping that Korea suddenly starts paying to watch its breakdancers.

Ambivalent as the dancers are, they’re clearly brimming with national pride as they gear up to compete with Japan. When the film was shot, the Koreans were the reigning world champions, a showy Korean crew called Gamblerz having won the year before. The Gamblerz 2005 show may qualify as the oddest performance in the history of hip-hop. The crew splits into two groups and reenacts “the history of Korea” through six minutes of b-boy battling, one side representing the South and one the North. In the end, the sides are reconciled, and the crew springs into the eerily perfect synchrony that only the Koreans seem able to pull off.

Cho's father is deeply worried about his son’s financial prospects as a dancer; an American crew member’s father, by contrast, simply advises him to “rip that shit.” The locus of American breakdancing has shifted to Las Vegas—arguably where natural born showmen belong—and most of the crew is Hispanic. The Americans, too, feel the pull of national pride, and their relationship to national identity is no less complex. They don’t seem to register any dissonance when one of them argues that “we created this thing” and “it’s time to bring it back to the U.S.” Nor should they: That the descendents of Hispanic immigrants from the Southwest are defending the mantle of a culture developed by blacks in the Bronx of the 70s makes a kind of sense.

Like any great, populist dance film, Planet B-Boy ends with a battle. For nearly two decades, unremarkable Braunschweig has been home to the “battle of the year,” where crews from 20 or so nations fling themselves across a stage in tightly choreographed interpretations of American street battle. All share a superhuman athleticism; they’re as comfortable windmilling around on the palms of their hands as on the soles of their feet, jumping backward onto their forearms and springing forward in synchronized slow motion. The French, in the words of one promoter, have an unmatched sensitivity for music and flow. The Japanese dream up the most innovative, conceptually complex show. The Americans have a knack for individualizing their dancers, shaping characters out of movement. The Koreans dominate the competition with a combination of robot-like synchrony and gymnastic prowess. And the founder of the competition, the guy in charge of the logistics? German.

Clearly, Americans no longer own the dance. Some of the most poignant moments of the film come as Korean crew perform in Germany and the camera lingers on the Vegas crew’s faces. Their eyes are tinged with fear, their mouths slightly open. Afterward, one manages to offer a half-hearted pep talk. Their show is just “different,” he explains, “Hopefully the judges don’t just want to see…some amazing shit.”

The judges do want to see some amazing shit, which is why the Korean team "Last for One" emerges victorious. A first place finish at the competition at last gives Cho's crew some commercial viability, and in the film’s last scenes, the crew is shown flipping its way through shows in front of Korean crowds, at the World Cup, and—improbably—in a commercial for Korean tourism.

Planet B-Boy starts out as a film about the postnational flag of hip-hop, but its avatars are too adaptive to let a tidy narrative of global unity win the day. In the end, they manage to stretch the boundaries of old identities, finding room for a bastardized version of an American ghetto art form in the very definition of contemporary Korean culture. It’s surely possible to argue that a once-defiant art form is really and truly dead when it has been vetted by the Korean tourism board. But as one of breakdancing’s pioneers describes hip hop’s early days, “We were naming moves on the spot, making up the rules as we went along.”

When the old moves go stale, new ones emerge. There will be more b-boys, from more cultures, to dream up new rules in post-national street battles to come.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of reason.

Baby Gucci and the Death of Self-Governance

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:35:00 EDT

Because nothing sells like contempt for other people's consumption choices, Pamela Paul has written a book called PARENTING, INC. How We Are Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers — And What It Means for Our Children. From Kate Zernike's New York Times review:

As Pamela Paul chronicles in her occasionally frightening account, “Parenting, Inc.,” my generation of parents has fallen into the grips of Big Baby. Pushed by a host of factors — the guilt and exhaustion of working parents, the dispersion of family networks that once passed knowledge from generation to generation, the pressure of admissions from preschool to college, and a culture that worships all things celebrity (including its offspring) — we are intimidated or bamboozled into buying all sorts of goods and services that we not only don’t need, but that may harm our children...

“It may sound like a leap to go from baby toys to the death of democracy, but it’s a valid concern,” she approvingly quotes a child advocate saying. “A democratic populace relies on people who know how to think critically, who are willing and able to take action.”

The pictured diamond-studded, democracy-killing faux nipple can be had for a mere $17,000.

The Dangerous Extravagance of Servant Girls

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:20:00 EDT

The London Times reviews John Styles' Dress of the People: Everyday fashion in eighteenth-century England:

“The mill girl who wanted to dress like a duchess” has been identified by Neil McKendrick as one of the forces propelling the Industrial Revolution. Throughout the century, sartorial upward mobility got it in the neck, from Defoe at the beginning who said that female servants ought to wear livery to stop their extravagance (an argument still heard today but in relation to school uniform) to the London Magazine, which lamented in 1783 that “every servant girl has her cotton gowns, and her cotton stockings, while honest grograms, tammeys, linsey woolseys and many other articles of wool, which would be much more becoming their stations, lie to mildew in our mercer’s shops, are seldom enquired for but by paupers and parish officers”. Sociological inquiries, such as The State of the Poor by Sir Frederick Eden (1797), lamented that the poor in the South of England no longer spun their own clothes: “within these twenty years, a coat bought at a shop was considered as a mark of extravagance and pride”. As Styles mischievously puts it, “the modern morality tale of social bonds weakening as choice and individualisation intensify reproduces many of the anxieties expressed by eighteenth-century commentators about the perceived rise of plebeian participation in fashion”.
Reading Styles’s book, one is continually struck by the resemblances, on a much smaller scale of course, to today’s patterns and institutions of consumption, and also by the similarities in the way elite critics then and now purse their lips and sigh for a more homespun age.

Is it me or has anti-couture pro-homespun snobbery been on the decline? Most of the pursed lips I see are directed at the extravagance lavished upon young girls, not the adult women buying $700 it-bags, and much of the longing for a simpler, purer age plays out in the politics of organic food.

The Kidney Opt-Out Revolution

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:20:00 EDT

Economist Richard H. Thaler and law professor Cass R. Sunstein have a book out called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness in which they promote their theory of "libertarian paternalism." At the book's new blog, they mention Drew Carey's reason.tv bit about organ sales, and they seem to have come to some strange conclusions:

Reason, the libertarian magazine, has put together a video (hosted by comedian and libertarian advocate Drew Carey) on the virtues of organ donation.
The organ shortage in the U.S. is primarily due to default rules that require organ donors to formally register their wish to be a donor, known as explicit consent. In surveys, most Americans express a strong willingness to donate their organs upon death, but very few take the costly step of formally registering to become a donor. We tend to take people at their word that they do want to be an organ donor, and advocate switching the default rule from explicit to implicit consent, in which the minority of Americans (15-25 percent depending on polls) who do not want to be donors would fill out a form expressing those wishes.

As Virginia Postrel explains here, even if every one of us signs on as a potential donor, Americans will continue to die waiting. The circumstances under which deceased donor organs are usable remain quite limited, so abolishing the list entails incentivizing live donation. Only Iran has managed to find kidneys for everyone in need, and Iran has an imperfect, highly regulated system of organ sales.

Pointing out that presumed consent will not solve the problem is not exactly an argument against it, but the consent policy Thaler and Sunstein advocate is more complex than they seem to understand. It's an extremely delicate issue among minorities who are (with good reason) wary of the medical establishment, and it may be politically impossible in a society as heterogeneous as ours.

Rogue Traders of the World, Unite!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:20:00 EDT

Will no one protect French workers from their rapacious capitalist overlords? Consider the now notorious case of banker Jerome Kerviel, thrown into the cold for losing a mere $7 billion.

Jérôme Kerviel is challenging Société Générale for failing to respect French labour law when the bank fired him over an alleged €4.9bn ($7bn) rogue trading scandal.
However, a spokesman for Mr Kerviel on Thursday dismissed reports that he was suing the French bank for unfair dismissal. He said the former equity derivatives trader was “only standing up for his rights”.
Mr Kerviel received a letter confirming his formal dismissal from SocGen while he was in jail earlier this year. His lawyer wrote back in early February challenging the bank for not respecting labour laws.
One aspect of his challenge is the claim that SocGen failed to comply with the French legal requirement for employers to hold face-to-face meetings with any staff they fire to explain the reasons for the move.

Kerviel's spokesperson says the former trader doesn't actually want his job back. He just wants to know the reason for his dismissal.

Via Free Exchange.

Human Bondage: Now With Benefits!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:26:00 EDT

In retrospect, this was inevitable:

Sadly, egg donation has less to do with altruism and more to do with the exploitation of women–particularly young women and often poor women who are usually facing large debts or just trying to make ends meet.

In fact, we contend that human egg harvesting is the newest form of human trafficking.

That's from a piece in First Things coauthored by an adjunct professor at George Washington University and the founding director of Hands Off Our Ovaries. They're calling for Congress to adopt a definition of trafficking that encompasses not only Emperor's Club employees, but anyone who buys a kidney on the black market or eggs on the gray one. Given the breadth of their definition, it seems to me that it would also include sperm donors and surrogate mothers. Actually, given the breadth of their definition, it seems to me that it would include any employment contract of which these activists do not approve.

Even if the authors restrict themselves to adult women selling ova, it's worth reflecting on the vulgarity of this conflation. Johan Hari here describes a 14-year-old Bangladeshi girl sold into prostitution in Calcutta, forced to service 10 men a day. The average American egg vendor is probably a healthy middle class college student looking for help with tuition. If you're actually concerned about child slavery, the idea of comparing the experiences of the former and the latter might well strike you as grotesque.

The authors go on to claim that justification for including egg vending is right there in the UN protocol on trafficking (Pdf). As they explain it, article three includes (emphasis mine):

• acts of trafficking, which include recruitment of persons. Young women are heavily recruited for their eggs. One Google search would confirm this.
• means of trafficking, such as forms of coercion, fraud, deception, the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability, or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits.
• purposes of trafficking: exploitation, which is at the heart of trafficking, for the purpose of forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude, or the removal of organs.

Reading the agreement, I'm not convinced that this is an accurate summary. But it's telling that the authors' definition of human bondage involves the "giving or receiving of payments of benefits," which, to my knowledge, has not been a particularly common feature of slavery in the past.

My experiences as a victim of trafficking are chronicled here.

Less Research Is Needed!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:10:00 EDT

Arguments against genetically modified foods almost always begin with the contention that research is preliminary and inconclusive. Well, this doesn't help:

About 300 protesters invaded Monsanto's seed research unit in southeastern Brazil to protest Brazil's approval last month for genetically modified corn from Monsanto and Bayer AG for sale and planting, destroying a greenhouse and a testing field.

Much more on GMOs and Africa here.