Playground Safety Isn't a Bad Thing

John Tierney appears to have no love for internal consistency. In complaining that modern playgrounds are too safe he argues,

While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.

What does this mean in relation to modern, "safe" playgrounds?

“There is no clear evidence that playground safety measures have lowered the average risk on playgrounds,” said David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University in London. He noted that the risk of some injuries, like long fractures of the arm, actually increased after the introduction of softer surfaces on playgrounds in Britain and Australia.

The problem, then, is that safe playgrounds are making children less fearful of heights? While it's easy to believe that minor bumps, scrapes and bruises can help a child recognize that certain activities that look scary are reasonably safe, there's no reason to believe that the same holds true for serious injuries. Tierney chooses not to identify or link to any of the "studies" that support his assertions, but I doubt it's as binary an issue as he would have us believe. As kids are still getting injured, albeit in many cases less seriously, they should still be building a tolerance for heights.

“I think safety surfaces are a godsend,” [Adrian Benepe, NYC parks commissioner] said. “I suspect that parents who have to deal with concussions and broken arms wouldn’t agree that playgrounds have become too safe.”

Tierney blames the move for safer playground equipment and safety surfaces on lawyers, purporting that "Fear of litigation led New York City officials to remove seesaws, merry-go-rounds and the ropes that young Tarzans used to swing from one platform to another", linking to this article:

Monkey bars are disappearing in all parts of America, as safety guidelines, guarantees of accessibility for the handicapped and the play industry's self-policing have coalesced to force them out.

"The biggest reason is that this old playground equipment is not safe," said Dan Wagner, vice president of Landscape Structures Inc., a major manufacturer of new-style equipment based in Delano, Minn. "It's going on everywhere in the country."...

Many doctors agree that monkey bars are dangerous. "Of all the equipment in parks, it seems like the jungle gyms are worst in terms of injuries," said Ann DiMaio, director of pediatric emergency room services at New York Hospital/Cornell University Medical Center.

The article does mention fear of litigation, but does not suggest that those fears as opposed to the changes being principally motivated by improved safety and compliance with updated safety guidelines. The most serious injury mentioned in the article was a broken collarbone, with no indication that anybody even hinted at suing.

Here's the deal: Yes, safety standards change over time. Yes, as a result a lot of things that used to be less safe and more fun are now more safe and, in some case, less fun. Yes, that means if you ignore modern safety standards and regulations, you open yourself up to potential litigation when somebody is injured as a result of your bad choices. But Tierney's own source makes plain that the principal reason for making playgrounds safer is nothing more than that - diminishing the frequency and severity of injuries. That's a bad thing?

Also, while Tierney suggests that modern playground equipment is less fun than historic playground equipment, he misses a number of important issues. The first is highlighted in the article he references:

Dr. Harold Koplewicz, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Schneider Children's Hospital of Long Island Jewish Medical Center, said the important thing is to give children of all ages as great a sense of freedom as possible. If a parent is screaming at a child to be careful on the monkey bars, it defeats this goal.

"We all had glorious times on the jungle gym when we were kids," Dr. Koplewicz said. "But for today's child, there is no loss. It is better for him not to be watched all the time."

The second is that children engage in a great deal of play that does not involve playgrounds and play structures. Tierney confuses novelty with sustained interest:

Still, sometimes there’s nothing quite like being 10 feet off the ground, as a new generation was discovering the other afternoon at Fort Tryon Park. A soft rubber surface carpeted the pavement, but the jungle gym of Mr. Stern’s youth was still there. It was the prime destination for many children, including those who’d never seen one before, like Nayelis Serrano, a 10-year-old from the South Bronx who was visiting her cousin.

There are monkey bars in a school playground near where I used to live, along with a couple of modern play structures, an older wood structure, swings, basketball hoops, and other amusements. The monkey bars, most often, are abandoned. As were the monkey bars at my childhood elementary school.

For all of Tierney's concern about a loss of opportunity for "risky play" on playgrounds, I'm left wondering how much time he has actually spent watching kids play. I took my daughter to a playground a couple of years ago, and while she was enjoying the structure, slides, tunnels, and was practicing jumping or dropping to the ground from what to a four-year-old was still a considerable height, a couple of tweens were also playing on the structure. And I do mean on - canopies and covered slides may be intended to keep the elements out and kids contained, but for older kids they can be just another platform to climb on. As for the concern,

“Older children are discouraged from taking healthy exercise on playgrounds because they have been designed with the safety of the very young in mind,” Dr. Ball said. “Therefore, they may play in more dangerous places, or not at all.”

At my childhood elementary school, the play structure was for "the little kids". Older kids were simply expected to find other ways to play, and the older kids did exactly that. Further, the idea that a school can provide a play structure of sufficient size and with sufficient variety to keep kids interested in sustained play, day after day, year after year, is absurd. If they're occasional amusements, fretting that they won't be the principal source of a child's exercise, moreso an older child's exercise, is similarly absurd.

Legalization of Drugs as a Boon to Developing Nations

John Tierney proposes that we legalize heroin and cocaine:

Drug prohibition in Bolivia and Afghanistan has done exactly what alcohol prohibition did in America: it has financed organized crime.

The only workable solution is to repeal prohibition. Give Afghan poppy growers a chance to sell opium for legal painkilling medicines; give Andean peasants a legal international market for their crops in products like gum, lozenges, tea and other drinks. As Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance proposes, “Put the coca back in Coca-Cola.”

While there is no real question but that prohibition has led to the development of organized crime networks and crime syndicates, both domestically and abroad, there are a few problems with the second quoted paragraph.

First, is he truly speaking only of repealing prohibition of heroin and cocaine as derived from plants? Because if we're speaking of a broader legalization, synthetic drugs enter the picture - drugs which can be significantly more potent (and significantly more pharmaceutically pure) than those derived from plants. If we include synthetics there will probably be no significant boost to the developing world, as synthetics will generally be cheaper and safer. For manufactured products like gum, it would likely be much easier to use a controlled amount of a synthetic drug than to import, process, and control the concentration of a "natural" drug.

Second, the coca is in Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola continues to use a "de-cocainized" extract of the coca leaf as a flavoring ingredient. It is a given that Coca-Cola, despite its massive scale, is not using much of the world's coca crops. With all due respect to the fact that a tea containing cocaine, even in small amounts, would have quite the kick as compared to a modern Coca-Cola, how much of a market does Tierney anticipate for coca tea and other drinks?

Third, is he proposing a free-for-all, with a return to patent medications containing perhaps inconsistent amounts of cocaine or an opiate extract? Absent significant regulation and control, you might end up with the same type of toxicity that is frequently found in street drugs, cut with whatever is cheap and available before being sold to addicts. (Besides - there's too much money involved. I'm quite confident that the major manufacturers of "adult beverages", pharmaceuticals, and tobacco would successfully lobby for enough regulation to create a significant barrier to entry for any smaller players.)

Synthetic drugs, particularly the class formerly referenced as "designer drugs", present a significant conundrum for legalization. It is conceivable that a company could design a drug that is technically not physically addictive, and arguably has minimum effect on performance, and is many senses much safer than "street drugs", but which turns out to be highly psychologically addictive. For that matter, if all bets are off and everything is made legal, why not design a drug that is highly physically addictive?

I agree with Tierney's sentiment, consistent through his articles on the war on drugs, that the war has proved to be a costly mistake. I agree with his suggestion that it's time to try something different. But I suspect that a true legalization would create at least as many problems, perhaps more, than the current drug war - at least domestically. This is an issue where you can think yourself in circles, and never come up with a good answer. Although I would feel more comfortable with Mr. Tierney's proposal if he would at least provide a 100% effective addiction treatment, and describe how it would be made universally available as part of his initiative.

(Do you have a solution? Please share....)

Tierney Spins in Cirles on "Honor"

Behind the NY Times firewall, John Tierney shares his opinions on honor, insisting that in the Middle East they follow a "traditional" concept of honor which is alien to us:

In the West we’ve redefined “honorable” as being virtuous, fair, truthful and sincere, but that’s not the traditional meaning. Honor meant simply the respect of the local “honor group” - the family, the extended clan, the tribe, the religious sect. It meant maintaining a reputation for courage and loyalty, not being charitable to enemy civilians. Telling the truth was secondary to saving face.

If the concepts are that far apart, at what point should we recognize that we are discussing two separate concepts, even if we classify both as "honor". If the West views an orange as a tasty piece of fruit, and the Middle East views it as the result of a combination of red and yellow pigments, the fact that we can agree that both are orange doesn't mean that we're discussing the same thing. It is far too simplistic to suggest that, even if in other cultures the ties are stronger, people in the West don't form intense bonds to friends and family, to the point of being willing to lie, steal, or kill to protect their "honor group". Isn't it more than a bit simplistic (and perhaps more than a bit bigoted) to suggest that honor in the Middle East is synonymous with lying to save face?

Tierney elaborates on Western "honor":

Instead of might-makes-right, Christianity preached turning the other cheek. Instead of according special honors to an elite class of men, it preached egalitarianism and love toward strangers. It emphasized inner virtue, not outward glory.

The result was a new honor system in the West, chivalry, that was an uneasy combination of Christian virtues and knightly violence. Eventually, with the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeois and democracy, the system evolved into what Bowman calls honor-by-merit, epitomized by the Victorian ideal of the gentleman who earns his reputation by working hard, playing fair, defending the weak and fighting for his country.

Another way of looking at this would be that the "honor group" became expanded to include a much larger population, and thus the requirement that to remain honorable you had to respect the rights of that larger population. A longer historical view might question what seems to be portrayed as a direct causal connection between Christianity and an interpretation of honor that arose in a small island nation some 18 centuries after Christ's birth. A more cynical view would be that this presentation of public virtue was not necessarily maintained behind closed doors. A more honest view would be that, whatever the Victorian reality may have been, we've not done a good job of living up to that ideal - and perhaps we never have.

The problem today, as Bowman sees it, is that the whole concept of defending one’s honor has been devalued in the West — mocked as an archaic bit of male vanity or childish macho chest-thumping. But if you don’t create a civilized honor culture, you risk ending up with the primitive variety.

“The honor system in Arab culture is the default honor system, the one you see in street gangs in America — you dis me, I shoot you,” says Bowman, a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “We need a better system that makes it honorable to be protective of those who are weaker instead of lording it over them.”

If by honor we're talking about multi-generational honor-based blood feuds, well, yes... we of the West do tend to look down on that. But our culture is immersed in what Tierney contends is the "traditional" form of honor. We espouse a business culture which favors deception, if not outright lying, in order to maintain market advantage. We root for our local sports team, simply by virtue of its proximity. Our blood-soaked action heroes bring in hundreds of millions at the box office, and have even been known to ride their popularity into political office. We increasingly follow a concept of the meritocracy where the rich deserve to be wealthy beyond imagination, and the poor deserve penury. As a nation, we essentially shrug when the President demonstrates no particular concern about the loss of civilian life in a nation with which we are at war or which we don't deem to be of strategic importance, or with the secret detention and mistreatment of people our nation holds prisoner. When was the last national election where Victorian notions of honor were put ahead of winning?

Tierney's adopting a comparison of Arab honor to that of the inner city gang member? Is it that Tierney sees Arabs as being violent thugs, supporting themselves through crime, and who would kill a complete stranger over a pair of sneakers? Or is the parallel drawn exclusively in relation to taking revenge on someone for "dissing" you, in which case a less inflammatory example may have been G.W. Bush's five consecutive years of declining to attend the NAACP's annual convention? Perhaps instead, Tierney presents the parallel so that we can be drawn into his perspective - Arab culture, like street gang culture, is something to be eliminated without regret.

As for how you might transform the proposed Arab "primitive variety" of honor into a civilized honor culture, mabye Tierney would endorse attempting to introduce such concepts such as egalitarianism, and treating others as you want to be treated? He doesn't state what he has in mind, probably because the only things he could propose would undercut his thesis. As, for that matter, would any effort to examine the history of conflict in the Middle East through his prism of street gang philosophy. It's too easy to stand Tierney's arguments on their head: if Hezbollah hadn't "dissed" Israel by kidnapping its soldiers, and Israel weren't concerned about "looking weak" by negotiating a prisoner exchange, would we be seeing this massive military assault on Lebanon, or hearing Alan Dershowitz argue that "Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others"?

Your Next Promotion... Courtesy of Immigration

John Tierney is good enough to explain, using manicurists as his paradigm, how immigration leads to better jobs for English-speaking Americans:

Some Americans gave up their licenses, but the turnover wasn't much higher than it had been before the Vietnamese arrived. The chief effect of the competition was to discourage young Americans from entering the business, so over time the number of American manicurists dwindled.

"The Vietnamese didn't so much displace Americans as gradually replace them," Krynski says. "Some Americans stayed in the business in upscale salons, and others probably went into other occupations offering higher wages, like being a hairdresser."

Tierney himself prefers the upscale spas, comparing his experience getting a manicure from a Vietnamese immigrant who charged him $8, and a Beverly Hills manicurist who charges $150 for a house call.

Nguyen couldn't compete with Harris in ambience or conversation - I barely got her to utter her name. Harris spent half an hour working on my right hand, gently using compresses infused with tangerine and peppermint as well as a hazelnut and menthol scrub. Nguyen did my left hand in 10 minutes without explaining what she was doing.

(I understand in his next column he shares his experience test driving a Lincoln Navigator and a Toyota Yaris, and how surprised he is that the Navigator was more luxurious.)

A few days ago, Tierney suggested that we need immigrants to staff the assisted living centers and nursing homes of the future - "As the population ages, it’s going to get harder to find young people to do those jobs unless the Republicans in the House go along with the Senate’s plan to add legal immigrants". Not a peep, though, about how many people who would otherwise have become nursing home aides have upgraded their career plans to nurse, doctor, or administrator.

I'm not going to argue that workers in relatively low-skill, low-wage service jobs can't find alternatives, and perhaps can even take an extra semester or two at beauty school (or the equivalent) to become licensed to both do nails and cut hair. I also think Tierney's argument is a red herring, as the real risk to workers is not so much the loss of jobs or increased competition for jobs which must be performed by local workers, but the loss of jobs which can now be performed in other nations. When a worker who is supporting her family on a middle class income has her position eliminated, or when he is told that his wages are being slashed as part of his employer's reorganization, the possibility of "retraining" as a hairdresser or computer technician has limited appeal - they would become entry level workers competing with a pool of much younger, equally qualified job candidates.

These aren't issues that we can easily address, nor are they trends we can easily reverse. The more reactionary proposals, such as retreating from globalization or closing the borders to immigration, would likely do more harm than good. But to the extent that we can do something, I don't think it is particularly helpful to pretend that the well-documented divergence of wealth in this country does not result, at least in part, from the loss of job and income opportunity for ordinary workers. Or, for that matter, to pretend that there is not a problem because California manicurists seem to have done okay for themselves.

Men's Rights And Abortion

A few days ago, behind the New York Times firewall, John Tierney brought us his thoughts on the question of men's rights and abortion. This issue has come up quite a bit lately - perhaps it is growing traction. But I am astonished by the noodle-brained nonsense that passes for analysis, Tierney's piece being no exception. While presenting his thoughts within the context of Alito, he focuses on obstacles to those who question spousal notification laws:

The first is public opinion. Most Americans tell pollsters that they think a husband should be notified before an abortion, and the Pennsylvania law that Alito approved was hardly a draconian version of that principle. It merely required a woman to say, without presenting any proof, that she'd told her husband. If she said she feared physical abuse, she was exempted.

Assuming that is not an endorsement of government by opinion poll, it is worth noting that it should not be at all surprising that most people believe that a wife should tell her husband that she plans to have an abortion. It is also worth noting that the factoid presented does not also contend that a majority of Americans believe that she should be compelled to do so as a matter of law - and any such notion should be patently offensive to any small government conservative, let alone a libertarian.

Is it safe to assume that in a strong relationship, such issues will be discussed and the decision made by a married couple in concert? If not, we have much bigger issues to worry about in regard to the state of our nation's marriages than spousal notification laws. If so, this law only applies in the context of weak marriages which might be harmed or destroyed by spousal notification. In light of that, even with an exception for "fear of physical abuse", is this provision really about the sharing of information, or is it really about effecting the maximum possible coercion upon a woman who may fear being bullied, intimidated, or deserted based upon her choice?

The second obstacle is the logic of feminism. Spousal notification has been denounced as retrograde by the same advocates who have been demanding gender equality in the workplace and at home. If men are expected to be parents with equal responsibilities, shouldn't they at least be allowed to discuss whether to have a child?

Tierney appears to be suggesting that a pregnant woman and the father have an equal burden in regard to pregnancy. Hey - if Tierney can come up with a fetal transfer technique which transplants the fetus from the pregnant woman into the father, I'm with him all the way. But barring that, surely he can see at least a slight difference?

Last I checked, men are allowed to discuss whether or not they want to have a child. They are free to do so with any of their prospective sexual partners. If they decide that their philosophies are too different, or even suspect that their philosophies are so much as slightly different, they can pass on the encounter. Last I checked, married couples frequently discussed their plans to have (or not to have) a family, and what size it should be.

If the pro-choice side adopted a gender-neutral policy, then either the man or the woman would have the right to say no to parenthood. I don't know of anyone advocating that a woman be required to have an abortion, but there's another right that could be given to a man who impregnates a woman who isn't his wife. If the woman decided to go ahead and have the child, she would have to notify him and give him the option early in the pregnancy of absolving himself of any financial responsibility for the child.

Okay... so Tierney isn't going to let a man force a woman to have an abortion. But he is sympathetic to the notion of letting any man disclaim financial responsibility following pregnancy, thereby saddling the woman (and the state) with the cost of raising the child? Has he given this idea even the slightest amount of thought? Because I can think of many married couples where there is an imbalance of power in the relationship, where the husband would take this option knowing full well that his wife would have the child - creating a situation where she would be left destitute if she tried to leave him, but he could walk away at any time without financial consequence. What a wonderful world that would be. And I think it would be extremely common for single men to opt out of supporting their offspring. (And what if a fourth month ultrasound or seventh month amniocentesis showed a developmental disorder which would make child-rearing more difficult and expensive? Can dad still opt out?)

Oh, but don't you go accusing Tierney of being a sexist idiot, because he has proof he's not sexist - he can quote a self-proclaimed feminist:

This option to have a "financial abortion" has been advocated by a few iconoclasts - not all of them men with child-support payments. The term was coined by Frances Goldscheider, a professor of sociology at Brown University who studies family issues. She compares the current campaign against "deadbeat dads" to the punishments once given to "wayward women" for having illegitimate children.

"It used to be our daughters we worried about being forced into inappropriate parenthood, but now it must be our sons," she says. "Men should not be made to become fathers against their will. They should have the right Planned Parenthood has claimed for women: 'Every child a wanted child.'"

So to make sure that every child is a wanted child, we'll create a society with far more fatherless children (or far more abortions - it has to be one or the other). And to punish "wayward women", even if they are virgins to the point of the single encounter which leaves them pregnant, we free men up to be as sexually reckless and promiscuous as they want. What a wonderful world that would be....

Tierney even tries to distance himself from any accusation of sexism, quoting the same woman:

There is, of course, one big physical inequality between the sexes in this regard: it's the woman who must either have the abortion or go through the pregnancy.

But as Goldscheider points out, women also have more power than men to prevent the pregnancy because they have exclusive control over some forms of contraception. It's not fair, she says, for a woman who lies about being on the pill to be able to trick a man into marrying her or making child-support payments for 18 years.

The first easy response is that barrier methods are pretty darn visible, and remain available to men. The second easy response is that if you're in a situation where you believe a woman may be lying to you to "trap" you into impregnating her, you had darn well better either use a barrier method or forego the encounter. Besides, no birth control method is 100% effective - any man who doesn't want to take a chance on becoming a father is well-served to employ a back-up method. (Does Tierney suffer a "whore-madonna complex"? Does he really split the world into good women who don't have sex until they are married, and evil harpies who are out to trap men into marriage or the payment of child support? It sure seems so.)

In the end, Tierney decides against this proposal - not because of its absurd unfairness, but because it might end up hitting him in the pocketbook. But to be fair to men who have to pay child support, he's willing to impose the burden of spousal notification on women whose husbands might otherwise be excused of that burden.

Liberals On Campus

I know you're all crying about Times Select preventing you from reading John Tierney... that is, the little you can't glean from the headline for his column and his first sentence....

He recently wrote a rather incredible piece entitled "Where Cronies Dwell", which whines that it isn't fair that people accuse Bush of hiring cronies while not objecting to the faculty search process at law schools and journalism schools. Apparently he read a David Horowitz screed about the ratios of registered Democrats to Republicans at a handful of elite schools, accepted Horowitz's notion that "Democrat = Liberal" and "Republican = Conservative", ignored any faculty who did not register for either of the major parties (or did not register at all), and concocted "liberal to conservative" ratios based upon that childish analysis. Yes, folks, when Zell Miller taught at the University of Georgia, Tierney and Horowitz would have us believe that the faculty became more liberal.

Needless to say, neither Horowitz nor Tierney paid any heed to the fact that if Bush followed a search process similar to a typical faculty search, he would not have been able to hire the parade of fools he has appointed to important positions, let alone hit the 100% mark in preferred party affiliation. The Bush Administration is unabashed in pressing for Republican-only hiring policies on K Street, and from what I hear even within the lower levels of civil service (where party affiliation is not supposed to be considered). Although in some fields, or with some applicants, ideology may well be suggested by past published works, in many fields of law or journalism there won't be anything obvious about a prospective faculty member's publications which suggests a party affiliation - and the search committee can't ask. Tierney really thinks that there is a parallel?

For some reason - and one can hardly guess why - Tierney and Horowitz also present no estimates of the ratio of "liberals" to "conservatives" at top engineering schools or business schools. (They also don't complain about a lack of conservative professors at top schools of social work... I can only imagine how may hardcore conservatives are clamoring to get faculty appointments, and how many novitiate social workers are traumatized by the left-wing bent of their faculties.) You know what? Different academic fields attract different types of people, often offering them significantly less money than they could otherwise earn, and rewards specific types of thinking and analysis. If you are surprised that certain fields attract disproportionate numbers of "liberals" and others attract disproportionate numbers of "conservatives", you haven't been thinking very hard.

And despite the experience of crybabies like Ann Coulter, I don't recall that the even the most stauch conservatives in my law school class feared retalation, and many were very outspoken in class. I looked up what a couple of them, the most obvious and outspoken of the conservatives in my section, are doing today... One is a partner with a large law firm, and another is a VP and general counsel with a Fortune 30 company. Oh, how they suffer. As for Tierney's suggestion that "more than 80 percent" of the nation's press corp is Democratic, that does not appear to be even close to true:

Another highly regarded study, the 2002 American Journalist Survey, found that 37 percent of journalists called themselves Democrats (just a few points above the proportion of Democrats in the general population), 18.6 percent said they were Republicans, and 33.5 percent were independents.

Does this mean that in TierneyWorld, if you're not a Republican you must be a Democrat? He seems to have lost his center.

Today, Tierney's follow-up offers the teaser: "Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing their opinions reinforced that they have a hard time imagining there are intelligent people with different views." Oh, I doubt that. But if Tierney's logic is supposed to pass for an example of what Liberals fail to find persuasive... that's nobody's fault but his own.

Tierney whines that the number of "liberal" faculty members, presumably based upon the child-like analysis he cribbed from Horowitz, is increasing. Well, you know what? The ratio of conservatives on the nations courts, particularly the federal courts, seems to be increasing faster. Although Tierney has yet to identify a single qualified conservative who was unable to obtain an appointment to an elite law school or journalism school, he is offended by the concept that such discrimination might occur. (Tierney instead resorts to the standard evasion, "many conservatives do want to become scholars, but they can't find work on campus" - many? How many? How qualified are they? How many faculty jobs have they attempted to obtain? How did they compare to the people who got the jobs? While I would not contend that "Righties Can't Teach", it is somewhat amusing to note that in asking "Why Righties Can't Teach" Tierney fails to distinguish opportunity from ability.) The real world? I guess Tierney is trying to impress us that he, himself, truly is an "academic" by observing the caricature that academics are stuck in the ivory tower, and are oblivious to the real world.

Huge Gas Taxes - The Tierney Cure-All

It's a bit hard to follow the writings of John Tierney these days, at least without paying money to the New York Times. Still, I stumbled across a reproduction of one of his recent columns in which he proposes higher gas taxes. I will admit some amusement that the person reproducing the editorial wrote, "Curb the deficit (Democrats would like that) and start to solve the US gas hunger." - it wasn't so long ago that the Republicans were supposedly the party that wanted to balance the budget.

For many, many years, a very left-wing radio host in the Detroit area, Peter Werbe, has been calling for an increase in the gas tax, proposing that the revenues from the gax tax be channeled into public transportation - that is, you make it more expensive to drive a car, while making it cheaper and easier to get to the same destination through public transportation. As a left-winger, he's of course attuned to the fact that an increase in the cost of gasoline without improvement in public transportation could translate into an immediate, regressive tax on the working poor who are dependent upon cars to get to work. And I have heard many others on the political left, including environmentalists, call for higher gas taxes as an incentive to reduce energy consumption. I recall hearing many arguments against Bush's demand for oil exploration in ANWR on the basis that, even assuming significant oil reserves, much greater energy savings could be achieved through conservation.

Apparently Tierney missed all of that. In his world, all that the political left has demanded are subsidies for alternative sources of energy, and for regulations which require appliances to be more energy efficient. He complains that the former hasn't worked, and that the latter causes appliances to become more expensive (which he asserts amounts to a regressive tax). In relation to cars,

Besides being costly, conservation rules produce unintended consequences. The fuel-efficiency standards for cars led to that environmentalist nightmare, the S.U.V., which became popular because of a loophole in the rules.

Consumers who wanted a big car had to buy one pretending to be a truck because carmakers were forced to downsize their fleets. As cars became lighter, they
also became more dangerous, resulting in an additional 2,000 deaths per year, according to the National Research Council.

Interesting. So nobody ever "had to" buy a full-size van or minivan, before SUV's hit the market? And we're to pretend that the "loophole" wasn't an open secret - one which, Congress willing, could have been easily closed with the stroke of a pen?

Further, it is generally accepted that when fuel prices reach certain levels, people very much take fuel efficiency into account when purchasing vehicles. That is to say, whether the increase in efficiency comes from CAFE rules being extended to SUV's or from an extra $0.50 to $1 per gallon under the Tierney gas tax, people will still move toward those vehicles Tierney describes as lighter and more dangerous.

His arguments on alternative energy present a similar question - if people won't invest in alternative energy (e.g., solar panels on their homes) because even with any present subsidy they are more expensive than the status quo, their incentives presumably will change if traditional energy sources are made subject to a substantial new tax or tax increase. You might not invest in a solar panel for your roof to save $5/month in electricity; you might think again, though, if due to a tax increase your savings would suddenly jump to $50/month.

Tierney seems to believe that a gas tax, and perhaps consumption taxes in general, are good because they "make people figure out on their own how to burn less gasoline". (Or, conversely, free people to burn as much gasoline as they want assuming they are willing to bear the cost - as Tierney also notes, "Individuals don't always make the best choices about energy use.") But unless phased in over time, a significant gas tax would be immediately regressive, hammering the working poor at a time when higher gas prices are already taking a bigger bite out of their paychecks. (But perhaps I'm forgetting that Tierney doesn't live here - he lives here - he can shrug off concerns about the working poor with "why don't they ride the subway.")

Assuming, though, that the Tierney tax is implemented, what should be done with the revenues? Improve the nation's infrastructure? Subsidize conservation programs? Invest in research into alternative energy sources? Pour it into the general fund? Nope. Tierney is apparently proposing that his "solve-everything" tax be diverted into new privatized Social Security accounts ("By raising the federal gas tax and putting the revenue in new Social Security individual accounts, we can save energy and reform Social Security.") So in the name of individual choice, we'll have the government impose a significant increase on the gasoline tax, place the money into mandatory "individualized" savings accounts that we can't control, and the world will magically be made better on all fronts. While people who must drive their old cars to low-paying jobs five or six days a week will rejoice at being liberated from oppressive CAFE standards?

Leaving aside my natural skepticism of any plan where the government supposedly allocates a new revenue stream to a specific purpose (consider, e.g., the sleight of hand by which lottery revenues "went to schools" without any net increase in school funding), and the seemingly obvious question of whether it would make more sense to increase the Social Security tax to pay for a new Social Security program... beyond "choosing" how to pay my bills despite having my pocketbook lightened by a new tax, in the world of those less privileged than Tierney, what does any of what he proposes actually do to advance individual choice?

The Drug War

A couple of weeks ago I criticized John Tierney for not taking on the drug war in a piece which seemed to confuse the overbroad application of Florida's draconian anti-drug laws with a campaign against pain management. So I have to give him credit for directly tackling the issue a couple of days ago.

War on Drugs Gone Wrong

John Tierney is getting a lot of attention for his piece on "Punishing Pain", in which he tangentially addresses Florida's bizarre, over-the-top drug laws. I do have a criticism of the piece, as in order to imply the innocence of the subject of his piece, a man who is presently incarcerated for forging prescriptions for narcotic medications, he effectively accuses the man's doctor of writing improper prescriptions and of committing perjury. Such an implication is not necessary to his point, which is that you shouldn't have to risk incarceration to obtain effective pain relief.

The Florida law itself is not about "punishing pain" - it's part of the "war on drugs"> Reading the statute, it appears that Florida tacked language pertaining to prescription opiats onto a clause that was written to address street drugs, specifically heroin. The "mixture containing"-type language the statute uses is common for laws addressing street drugs that are "cut" by drug dealers. The presumption that somebody with 28 grams of heroin intends to traffic drugs makes more sense than the notion that somebody with a bottle of 60 Percocet (about the number of pills that, during his period of addiction, Rush Limbaugh obtained via prescription in any given week, and not likely to be more than a month's supply for any chronic pain patient) is a drug dealer? That's a stretch. On the other hand, if you looked to the actual weight of the drug, let's say 10 mg Percocet, you would have to have about 2,800 pills to implicate the law, which would make a presumption of intent to deal seem more reasonable.

Whatever you think of the law, the outcome in this case seems unjust. It does not appear that Mr. Paey ever engaged in drug trafficking, or that he ever had any intention of doing so.

Scott Andringa, the prosecutor in the case, acknowledged that the 25-year mandatory penalty was harsh, but he said Mr. Paey was to blame for refusing a plea bargain that would have kept him out of jail.

Well, no. The prosecutor picked the charge. The prosecutor chose to pursue Mr. Paey through three trials. And no matter to what degree the prosecutor felt bound by duty to do so, an absurd sentence mandated by law is not rendered less absurd by a defendant's unwillingness to plea bargain.

It is a shame that Tierney was so focused on the mistreatment of "sick people", as he could do more good by explicitly arguing for the introduction of some common sense into the "war on drugs". Or was that a deliberate choice - he doesn't want to challenge the war on drugs? I guess we'll find out over the next few years, if he continues to address these issues.

Now It Makes Sense

Last week, John Tierney suggested that older Americans were greedy and lazy for not working past standard retirement age. Today, he tries to redeem himself, holding out President John Quincy Adams as an example:

Most workers could keep going longer if they and employers reconsidered the old assumption about a career trajectory. They could learn from the example of John Quincy Adams, who was elected to Congress after serving as president. He dismissed objections that the new job was beneath him, and voters didn't discriminate against him for being overqualified.

Adams started his new career at age 63, just about when the typical American man now retires. He wasn't especially spry, once calling his body "a weak, frail, decayed tenement battered by the winds and broken in on by the storm." Yet he stayed on the job until his death at age 80.

He accomplished so much in those years that he is remembered as a better congressman than president. You could call him an inverse example of the Peter Principle, someone who succeeded by being demoted below his level of incompetence.

So I guess the next time I see a person, past the retirement age, clearing tables at McDonalds or working as a "greeter" at WalMart, I'll keep in mind Tierney's suggestion of the "inverse Peter Principle" - that they were probably not competent at their jobs before they took the more humble work - and that they could be serving in Congress had they not found that particular job to be beneath them.

Oh, how sad it must be to be a former President, with so few income opportunities available to you - and all of them so demeaning. Tierney sure knows how to blow the wind out of the sails of a song like "Fortunate Son".

Keeping The Elderly In The Workforce

When I saw the teaser for Tierney's latest on Social Security ("If the elderly were willing to work longer, there would be lower taxes on everyone and more national wealth and tax revenue to help the needy.") my first thought was, "He's probably going to tell us that if we would only work to the age of 105, like the industrious Chileans, everything would be perfect." (I was inspired, of course, by his past writings.) I didn't actually expect that to be the case, but I was a lot closer than I expected. Meanwhile, Tierney continues to overlook the once-lauded "privatization" of Britain's pension system.

Tierney argues, with little apparent thought given to the realities of life for the elderly, that

Americans now feel entitled to spend nearly a third of their adult lives in retirement. Their jobs are less physically demanding than their parents' were, but they're retiring younger and typically start collecting Social Security by age 62. Most could keep working - fewer than 10 percent of people 65 to 75 are in poor health - but, like Bartleby the Scrivener, they prefer not to.

Those darn lazy elderly workers have, it seems, no incentive to work once their Social Security benefits become effectively fixed.

Once you've worked 35 years, more work often yields only a tiny increase in your benefits (sometimes none at all), but you still have to keep paying the onerous Social Security tax, which has more than doubled over the last half century.

If the elderly were willing to work longer, there would be lower taxes on everyone and fewer struggling young families.

This, of course, is meant to be an argument for privatization of Social Security - that if people contributed to their private accounts, rather than contributing to a defined system of guaranteed benefits, they would have greater incentive to keep working because their "private account" would continue to grow. But somehow, recalling the various elderly people I see working in the community at stores like Meijer or even fast food restaurants, I find it hard to believe that they see no financial benefit from working - it seems far more likely that they are trying to supplement their fixed retirement incomes by working low-wage jobs. Perhaps, though, Tierney (who, in a most non-elitist manner, compares the retired elderly to Bartleby the Scrivener) isn't even aware that such people exist. The Guardian provides a more informed take on the situation:

It is all very well to talk glibly about raising pensionable ages. Nobody has yet explained what many people will do in their extended working lives. Some are capable of carrying on for years past 60: doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, desk workers.

But nobody can reasonably expect manual workers to keep going as their physical strength declines and all the usual ailments of late middle age set in. Even more significant for industry and commerce, it seems absurd to suggest that people in executive roles should be given a right to keep them after 60.

Most of us slow up, some become burnt-out cases. It is already a problem for many businesses that, amid relentlessly changing markets and technologies, key jobs need the energies and imaginations of 30-something-year-olds, not tired sexagenarians.

The Guardian acknowledges that some realignment of the British system may be requires, but unlike Tierney it directly addresses the realities for elderly workers:

Many people in their last working years will have to do humbler jobs than they have been used to, for less pay.

Tierney also argues that by forcing the elderly to work longer before they could retire, ostensibly while removing Social Security from the tax system, the net result would be "more national wealth and tax revenue available to help the needy, including people no longer able to work as well as the many elderly below the poverty line because they get so little Social Security." Hm. So if the elderly work longer, more jobs will magically be created in the economy? If Social Security taxes are no longer part of the tax system (through a privatization estimated to require $2 billion from the general fund?) tax revenues will go up? And the net effect of this will be to allow us to subsidize the impoverished elderly, who presently retire too early because Social Security is so generous? One hardly knows what to say.

And then, to cap it off, he resorts to the Chilean system - and actually suggests that if we had a system like Chile's we could retire sooner than the present system allows. But he apparently recognizes the contradiction, and thus suggests that Chileans have a "saner attitude about retirement" than lazy American baby boomers, and typically intend to work after they retire. (His thesis is supproted by a conveniently perfect quote from an ostensible "typical Chilean", encountered... somehow. Tierney's taking a page from Friedman's style book.)

[Updated to correct hyperlink to Tierney's original editorial.]

A Poorly Chosen Example?

After taking on the subject of "what women want", and suggesting that it isn't success at the highest levels of business and industry, John Tierney is now attempting to buttress his thesis with the results of Scrabble tournaments.

For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the world's 50 top-ranked players, typically about 45 are men.

And my guess is that pretty much any of the women Tierney just referenced could beat him in at least four games out of five... which might have been an interesting subject for his column, but instead we get something else entirely.

The top players, both male and female, point to a simple explanation for the disparity: more men are willing to do whatever it takes to reach the top. You need more than intelligence and a good vocabulary to become champion. You have to spend hours a day learning words like "khat," doing computerized drills and memorizing long lists of letter combinations, called alphagrams, that can form high-scoring seven-letter words.

Suppose you draw the letters AELNRST. A mid-level player could shuffle the tiles for a while and find one or two seven-letter words. If the T in that rack were a U instead, the player might spend a couple of minutes fruitlessly looking for an anagram of AELNRSU.

Tierney suggests that women are inclined to chase after the genes of victorious men with the means to support children. "And when women pursued what's called a short-term reproductive strategy - a quick fling - then presumably evolution favored the woman who was attracted to a man with good genes, as manifest either in his looks or in some display of prowess." He then suggests that guys at the bottom often end up alone, giving them an incentive to complete, and attempts to close the circle: "It has been noted at Scrabble tournaments that some of the best players are single guys with wide-open social calendars."

Perhaps Mr. Tierney should consult with some of the male leaders of government, business, and industry, to see how many of them can compete at the highest levels of Scrabble, which of them read dictionaries to relax, which of them memorize lists of anagrams for fun... And perhaps he should consider why people with those traits are more inclined to have wide-open social calendars despite their tournament success. Giving Tierney's claim of "Scrabble groupies" (who presumably lust after tournament winners) its due, he may also wish to inquire how many of the leaders he interviews (the guys he describes as "the few rich winners [who] have gotten more than their share of wives (through polygamy or a series of trophy wives)") have Scrabble groupie wives.

If Mr. Tierney doesn't recognize the difference between the competitive behaviors which lead to wealth, power, and a succession of trophy wives, and those which lead to remarkable success at Scrabble with an empty social calendar, he doesn't know enough to be writing about this subject. (I don't mean to neglect the occasional socially inept CEO who is obsessed with words or numbers, or to diminish the possibility of a Rudolph Valentinos of the Scrabble set - I'm speaking in generalities, which I believe hold.) As Tierney himself suggests in his terminal sentence, the traits and interests which put you at the pinnacle of Scrabble play aren't those which are likely to make you a prime candidate as a CEO.

And *That* Makes All The Difference

In suggesting that we should emulate Chile's system of private pensions to replace Social Security, John Tierney states:

You may suspect that Pablo has prospered only because he's a sophisticated investor, but he simply put his money into one of the most popular mutual funds. He has more money in it than most Chileans because his salary is above average, but lower-paid workers who contributed to that fund for the same period of time would be in relatively good shape, too, because their projected pension would amount to more than 90 percent of their salaries.

By contrast, Social Security replaces less than 60 percent of your salary - and that's only if you were a low-income worker. Typical recipients get back less than half of their salaries.

Okay... all well and good. But what if the stock market underperforms? Tierney explains that "But if you contribute for at least 20 years, Chile guarantees you a minimum pension that, relative to the median salary, is actually more generous than the median Social Security check."

You know what, John? If President Bush were to propose private accounts with an accompanying guarantee that nobody's Social Security benefits would be reduced as a result, we wouldn't even be having a debate. If he guaranteed benefits more generous than those which would be paid under the current system, as you assert is the case under the Chilean system you wish for us to emulate, the nation would stampede to support him. When can we expect your column explaining why Bush doesn't offer such a guarantee?

Mistaken Impressions

I have no real objection to the color portraits that the New York Times places alongside its opinion pieces. But every now and then I find myself wondering why Regis Philbin is writing a guest editorial. (Separated at birth?) (Illustration)