Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

Frank Foer Badly Needs to Exercise Some Quality Control Over The New Republic. Badly.

Marty Peretz: About the time I bought The New Republic, the British satirist and editor of Punch, Alan Coren, published a book titled The Collected Bulletins of Idi Amin, purporting to be the actual writings of the then dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin. They were attacks on the belly and politically smart, too. I got in touch with Coren and his publisher with the idea of putting the collection out in America. Frankly, I chickened out because the lingo of the volume was black jive talk which seemed uncannily apt for an African tyrant-bullshitter. Well, it was for that reason deemed by those around me too sensitive or rather insensitive for TNR. So I stopped negotiations with the publishers in London, and the wonderful book was never issued on our shores. It made plenty of money in England. Some of the book's pieces are reprinted here. If you don't laugh at these ... well, you're a stiff.

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Alan Coren: De Chrissermuss Broadcast, 'Punch' December 5 1973: DIS DE POINT where we steppin' into de worldwide role good an' proper, on account of dis bein' de tex' o' de pop'lar Xmas Broadcast, goin' out f'om de famous Radio Uganda station in de trendy downtown Kampala to ev'ry corner o' de world always provided we gittin' de plugs in proper an' not leavin' no bare wires hangin' out o' de skirtin' in Studio B. which is wot happenin' durin' de birfday broadcast an' it blowin' all de valves out o' de transmitter, had to wait six weeks fo' a new one f'om Hamley's, also all de wattles comin' off of de roof.

De broadcast goin' out at three o'clock pee em on Xmas day, an' de whole popperlation o' Uganda gonna be lissenin' in wid de love an' loyalty an' devotion, on account of we got de detector jeeps out an' anyone still guzzlin' de mince pies at 3.01 gonna find hisself havin' de brandy balls stepped on, not to mention bein' arrested by de ear an' taken down to HQ fo' a touch o' de seasonal goodwill, such as bein' worked over wid a lead-filled turkey. Now, here de scrip', hot f'om de miraculous four-colour Biro: Hallo word an' all de loyal subberjecks, especially all those on de Wolf Rock Lighthouse an' sim'lar, dis here are President Idi Amin speakin' f'om de centre o' de known universe an' hittin' you wid de Peace on Earf bit, which is jus' us DJs' way o' sayin' dat de time come roun' again fo' gittin' de matchin' socks an' hankies an' turnin' our thoughts to de loved ones wot sendin' dis sort o' junk, can't even be bothered gittin' de size right; jus' as a example, an' showin' dat even de top heads o' state human bein's like anyone else, de fust present I got dis year comin' f'om de Finance Minister an' it takin' de form o' de barf salts, an' wot I'd like to say is, it interestin' to learn he doan like de way I smellin' an' he got to de end o' de broadcast to clear out de desk an' git hisself down de car-park where he takin' up de noo duties, an' damn lucky it Yuletide, else he gittin' de head shrunk on top of it.

Turnin' now to de international scene, wot de hell happenin' to de Queen's Xmas card? I sendin' her de pussonal home-made job, wot I doin' wid de little bits o' sticky coloured paper, an' a damn fiddlin' job, too. If I ain't gittin' de recipperocation by de nex' post, de dipperlomatic representative o' HM Gumment gonna find hisself on de inside lookin' out.

Dis natcherly bringin' me to everyone spendin' Xmas in clink: it de time when we got to think o' those less fortunate than ourselves, so all you in chokey start thinkin' about de ones wot buried in quicklime in de prison yard, still plenty o' room out there fo' de slackers, an' I gittin' de word where a lotta shoddy mailbags bin appearin' lately, an' dis de last time I mentionin' it.

De way I seein' it, Xmas is a time fo' de fambly, an' I lookin' upon de whole word as a fambly, i.e. anyone steppin' out o' line gittin' de head smacked, especially if Julius Nyerere lissenin', altho' I ain't namin' no names, also any o' de Asian brudders wot givin' me lip, all ex-colonial rubbish wot still hangin' about de place, any memmers o' de Ugandan judiciary wot still on de lam, an' any subberjecks goin' roun' mumblin' under their bref.

Wow, lisseners, I jus' catchin' sight o' de studio sundial, an' it 3.10 already, so I signin' off now an' gittin' back to de puddin'. I mean, I'm fo' de peace an' de goodwill stuff as much as de nex' man, but enuff is enuff!

Charlie's Diary: Why I don't (usually) use Windows

Via Charlie Stross's regrettable attempt to upgrade to Windows 7, L2GX:

Charlie's Diary: Why I don't (usually) use Windows: My girlfriend has a vaio from back when she was working for sony, and I have to agree; Sony are the bloatware specialists... the hardware though... nice.

In general Sony's engineers seem to have the free hand in designing the prettiest, friendliest, most well-built machines possible. They get to develop advanced technology, or buy it from competitors at any price. At the cutting edge of consumer electronics their design process has the grace and elegance of a tea ceremony.

Their products have a soul.

Then, at a certain point during development, the engineers take their slick, shiny prototype up to the thirteenth floor and leave it on a massive smoked glasss table in an dark, empty conference room. They go home silently, and drink sake in a melancholy their wives cannot understand.

Back on the thirteenth floor, a team of crack marketeers emerges and starts handicapping the prototype. They add bloatware that links to unyielding vaporware websites, disable hardware for unlocking in future updates, install seven gigs of designer screen saver 'introduction' movies. They disable any meaningful way to use the device without buying into a distributed network of an occult protocol.

Meanwhile the CEO's stalk each other in bamboo rooftop forests, their katanas gleaming with the blood of intra-corporate informants as they search to battle for supremacy.

At home the engineers try to forget what could have been. At one point they have drank enough sakes to allow themselves to cry a single, desperate tear.

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Charlie Stross's Update:

Fifty hours and yes, I now have a Vaio P running Windows 7, fully patched and updated and mercifully free of re-installed Sony bloatware.... The Vaio is still chittering away re-indexing the filesystem, but by tomorrow it should be done. As it's no slower — while indexing — than Vista was while twiddling its thumbes, I shall call this a win, and declare the upgrade complete at 50 hours ellapsed, wall clock time.... Microsoft: providing pointless hamster-wheel exercises for gearheads since 1976.

Matthew Yglesias: Health Insurance, Death, Michael Cannon, and the Cato Institute

Matthew Yglesias: Health Insurance and Death: Cato’s Michael Cannon has a post up which, unlike Charles Lane’s writings on the matter, actually attempts to engage on the merits with the argument that lack of health insurance leads to people dying. But even though he cites a number of studies on the subject, only one, the Richard Kronick study, actually address the point the Institute of Medicine study was referring to. Kronick concludes that the approximately 20,000 deaths per year is an overestimate due to a failure to control for relevant demographic variables. Conversely, Andrew P. Wilper, Steffie Woolhandler, Karen E. Lasser, Danny McCormick, David H. Bor, and David U. Himmelstein found in their “Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults” that the IOM study is a serious underestimation:

The study, which analyzed data from national surveys carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), assessed death rates after taking education, income and many other factors including smoking, drinking and obesity into account. It estimated that lack of health insurance causes 44,789 excess deaths annually.

Previous estimates from the IOM and others had put that figure near 18,000. The methods used in the current study were similar to those employed by the IOM in 2002, which in turn were based on a pioneering 1993 study of health insurance and mortality.

A separate study indicated that individuals lacking health insurance were more likely to die even in the context of emergency room visits:

The researchers took into account the severity of the injuries and the patients’ race, gender and age. After those adjustments, they still found the uninsured were 80 percent more likely to die than those with insurance — even low-income patients insured by the government’s Medicaid program.

“I’m really surprised,” said Dr. Eric Lavonas of the American College of Emergency Physicians and a doctor at Denver Health Medical Center. “It’s well known that people without health insurance don’t get the same quality of health care in this country, but I would have thought that this group of patients would be the least vulnerable.”

If “no health insurance means bad health care” or “bad health care can lead to death” were some kind of wildly counterintuitive propositions at odds with sound theory, then I think we might have good reason to doubt these results. But in fact they’re perfectly intuitive results that accord perfectly with, among other things, the elementary economic theory that says people wouldn’t pay for health insurance unless it provided something of value. The bulk of empirical studies also seem to confirm this. Lack of insurance is associated with low-quality health care which is associated with enhanced risk of death.

Mark Kleiman: Precaution, uncertainty, insurance, and morality

Precaution, uncertainty, insurance, and morality « The Reality-Based Community: Whether to apply the “precautionary principle” in an actual situation depends on the size of the potential disaster, the probability that the disaster will come about if no action is taken, and the costs – including the opportunity costs – of taking the action. So at the end of the day there’s not much “principle” left, just a heuristic for doing decision analysis. 

But one point ought to be clear: greater uncertainty argues for more caution – more willingness to accept certain current losses to avoid possible large future losses – not less.   That’s because it’s easier to adjust to small changes than it is to large ones, so damage is likely to increase more-than-proportionally as the size of the change increases.

Assume some climate model predicts that, under some set of assumptions, average global temperature would rise 3° C by 2100. If the model were very accurate and precise, that might be 3°± 1°. If the mechanisms involved remain obscure and the data unclear – as is the case today – that might be 3°± 5°: that is, the best guess would be a 3° increase, but the actual outcomes might range between an 8° increase and a 2° decrease.

Given how bad a 3° increase would likely be, if we knew for sure that would be the outcome in the face of inaction there would be a strong agument for making big and expensive policy changes to prevent it from happening. And if we knew that for sure, it would be very hard politically to argue against doing something about the problem.

By contrast, 3°± 5° means that proponents of inaction get to say “We’re not even sure there’s any problem at all.” That makes the political case for action much weaker. But it makes the logicalcase for action much stronger.

The world – especially the much richer world of our great-great-grandchildren in 2100 – could adjust to a 3°, or even a 4°, increase in global average temperature, though at great cost in species extinctions, land area lost to rising sea levels (and therefore the forced migration of some large populations), and more extreme weather. That hotter planet would be, on average, a less pleasant place to live. But it would still be habitable.

But an 8° C average temperature increase is a completely different proposition, rendering much of the tropics virtually uninhabitable and, quite plausibly, hitting various triggers for positive-feedback effects such as the melting of the polar ice caps, which would reduce the amount of solar energy reflected back into space, and the melting of the Siberian permafrost, which would release a huge amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.  (Most systems are more stable in the face of small changes than they are in the face of large changes.)  Thus a primary increase of 8° might really mean an increase even larger than that: an increase that might not be reversible even if greenhouse-gas emissions were then sharply curtailed.

That would be the kind of disaster to which some version of the precautionary principle reasonably applies: if the risk of its happening is more than merely speculative, it’s not a risk to take, even if avoiding that risk requires major dislocations. It’s the same principle that tells you not to deal with a tighter family budget by canceling your homeowner’s insurance, even though the annual risk of a major house fire – unless you’re the kind of drunk likely to pass out in bed while smoking a cigarette – is way below 1%.

Ordinarily, it is the proponents of action who bear the burden of persuasion.  But in this case political inaction means, in effect, licensing a massive gamble, though no individual chooses to make it. Rather, the gamble would be the outcome of billions of uncoordinated self-interested decisions: precisely the sort of process that, in the absence of external costs, leads to efficient outcomes.  But none of the arguments for the freedom of economic activity applies to activities with huge, indirect, deferred, and diffuse external costs:  by contrast with Adam Smith’s baker, there is simply no “invisible hand” mechanism that directs private action in such a situation in the direction of the public interest.

The willingness of some politicians and pundits to bet the planet on the claim that climate scientists are talking through their hats, which involves the larger claim that they have managed to assemble an enormous conspiracy to perpetrate a hoax, calls either their intelligence or their morals into serious question.  And that goes for the journalists and media moguls who treat their ravings as if they represented simply one side in a reasonable argument.

If anyone tries to tell you that uncertainty about climate change is a reason for inaction, he’s either a fool or a scoundrel. Probably a bit of both.

James Kwak: A Partisan Post, You Have Been Warned

A Partisan Post, You Have Been Warned « The Baseline ScenarioLast night I read a post by Brad DeLong that made me so mad I had trouble falling asleep. (Not at DeLong, mind you.)  There’s really nothing unusual in there — hysteria about the deficit, people who voted for the Bush tax cuts and the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit but suddenly think the national debt is killing us, political pandering — but maybe it was the proverbial straw.

First, let me say that I largely agree with DeLong here:

I am–in normal times–a deficit hawk. I think the right target for the deficit in normal times is zero, with the added provision that when there are foreseeable future increases in spending shares of GDP we should run a surplus to pay for those foreseeable increases in an actuarially-sound manner. I think this because I know that there will come abnormal times when spending increases are appropriate. And I think that the combination of (a) actuarially-sound provision for future increases in spending shares and (b) nominal balance for the operating budget in normal times will create the headroom for (c) deficit spending in emergencies when it is advisable while (d) maintaining a non-explosive path for the debt as a whole.”

Now, let me tell you what I am sick of:

1. People who insist that the recent change in our fiscal spending is the product of high spending, without looking at the numbers, because their political priors are so strong they assume that high deficits under a Democratic president must be due to runaway spending. And it’s not just Robert Samuelson.

2. People who forecast the end of the world without pointing out why the world is ending. Here’s Niall Ferguson, in an article entitled “An Empire at Risk:” “The deficit for the fiscal year 2009 came in at more than $1.4 trillion—about 11.2 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That’s a bigger deficit than any seen in the past 60 years—only slightly larger in relative terms than the deficit in 1942.” But does he mention that the reason for the 2009 deficit is lower tax revenues due to the financial crisis and recession? No. Here’s Ferguson on the 10-year projection: “Meanwhile, in dollar terms, the total debt held by the public (excluding government agencies, but including foreigners) rises from $5.8 trillion in 2008 to $14.3 trillion in 2019—from 41 percent of GDP to 68 percent.” Does he mention that, as early as January 2008, that number was projected to fall to 22%, and the majority of the change is due to lower tax revenues? No.

3. People who posture about our fiscal crisis who voted for the Bush tax cuts — shouldn’t shame require them to keep silent?

4. People who say, like Judd Gregg, “after the possibility of a terrorist getting a weapon of mass destruction and using it against us somewhere here in the United States, the single biggest threat that we face as a nation is the fact that we’re on a course toward fiscal insolvency,” as if this is a new problem, when it’s been around since 2004 (see Figure 1) — when, I might add, Judd Gregg was a member of the majority. (Tell me, was Niall Ferguson forecasting the end of the American empire in 2004, when everything he says now about long-term entitlement spending was already true? That’s a real question.)

5. People who say that we can’t pass health care reform because it costs too much, ignoring the fact that the CBO projects the bills to be roughly deficit neutral, ignoring the fact that the Senate bill has received bipartisan health-economist support for its cost-cutting measures, and ignoring the fact that our long-term fiscal problem is, and always has been, about health care costs (see Figure 2).

6. People who say the Obama administration is weak on the deficit (Ferguson refers to Obama’s “indecision on the deficit”, and he is gentle by Republican standards), when by tackling health care costs head-on — and in the process angering their political base — they are doing the absolute most important thing necessary to solve the long-term debt problem.

7. People who cite “financial ruin” purely, absolutely, incontrovertibly as a political tactic to try to kill health care reform (courtesy of DeLong and Brian Beutler)...

8. Joe Lieberman.

TBogg on Sarah Palin: It’s a minority type thing. You wouldn’t understand…

TBogg » It’s a minority type thing. You wouldn’t understand…: As reported the other day, back when she was a little co-ed and going through colleges like Tiger Woods goes through women, that Sarah Palin lady was not fond of Epicanthic Fold-Americans:

Palin, though notoriously ill-traveled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii. She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. “Hawaii was a little too perfect,” Palin writes. “Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.” Perhaps not. But Palin’s father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to Conroy and Walshe. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” In any case, Palin reports that she much preferred her last stop, the University of Idaho, “because it was much like Alaska yet still ‘Outside.’ “

Matthew Yglesias on Tom Friedman: Time to Play This Video Again I Guess

David Frum: Sarah Palin’s Woman Problem

Sarah Palin’s Woman Problem: Opinions differ about Sarah Palin – everybody knows that. But what infuses debate over the governor with special energy is that we can’t even get to agreement on the basic facts.

Pro-Palin conservatives take it for granted that Palin is immensely popular and that she helped turn around McCain’s staggering campaign. Nothing seems to shake this view: not the polls showing that 63% of Americans say they would “never” consider voting for her, not evidence that McCain’s slide in the polls coincides not with the economic data, but with his choice of Palin as running mate, not Palin’s own precipitous collapse in public approval over the month of October 2008.

(There are a lot of numbers in this last link, but note particularly the CNN polls on the question about whether McCain/Obama/Biden/Palin have the qualities a leader should have. McCain began the fall campaign with 62% thinking him a good leader – and ended with the same 62%. Obama began at 62% and ended at 65%. Biden gained more: from 55% to 67%. And Palin? She plunged from 47% to 37%. By the end of the campaign 63% of Americans said she did NOT have the qualities a president should have.)

Here’s the latest installment in this alternative reality fiction.

I was interviewed on PBS last week about Palin’s book release. I said that Palin had an especially serious problem with women voters.

This is just fact, again recorded in every survey. In October 2008, Palin’s support dropped furthest and fastest among women, and especially among independents: more than two dozen points among independent women in barely 6 weeks. Consistently since the campaign, every survey has shown the former Alaska governor much more popular among men than women. And yet this attested statistical fact is shrugged off with comments like, “when I saw her campaign in N.H., I was surrounded by moms with strollers.”

So let’s try to bang this one down for keeps.

Earlier this month, CNN/Opinion Research released a poll showing that only 28% of Americans now think Palin qualified for the presidency. 70% say she is unqualified.   Even among Republicans, only 54% think she is qualified, 44% say No.

The published poll does not break these answers down by sex, but I asked my friends at the Political Unit for the cross-tabs, and here’s what they show:

While 33% of men deem Palin qualified, only 24% of women do. 66% of men deem her unqualified – and 74% of women.

Now look just at Republicans: Republican men deem Palin “qualified” by a margin of 60-38. But Republican women? Not even half think she is qualified: only 49%. 50% of Republican women say Palin is unqualified for the job.

If you like Palin – well go ahead. It’s a free country. But quit saying that “the people” love Sarah Palin.

They don’t. Actually, they quite dislike her. The longer they know her, the more they dislike her. And even more than they dislike her, they do not respect her. That reaction of dislike and disrespect is most concentrated among American women.

Sarah’s constituency is a relatively small cohort of conservative men. I offended a lot of these people last week by suggesting that there was some sexual dynamic at work in the enthusiasm for the politician whom Rush Limbaugh used to describe as “Governor Babe.” So let’s put it this way: Whatever impulse it is that so excites Palin supporters, it is not shared by their wives.

Will of the League of Ordinary Gentlemen on National Review

Andy McCarthy, just askin’ questions: Seriously, National Review. This is getting embarrassing:

I didn’t suggest that Bill Ayers is the author of one of Barack Obama’s biographies — I reported that someone else had made the suggestion and had made an interesting case . . .

JFK also made “an interesting case,” but I rather doubt that anyone is devoting precious column space to Oliver Stone’s pet conspiracy theories. This is also rich:

I did not defend the ‘birther movement’s’ claim that Obama was not born in Hawaii — I’ve stated that I believe he was born in Hawaii. What I’ve argued is that Obama was born a dual citizen (of Kenya and the U.S.), almost certainly became an Indonesian citizen, and has not been forthcoming about his past.

You see, McCarthy’s a respectable conspiracy theorist. He’s presumably referring to this paragraph from his infamous, un-sourced descent into conspiracism last January (thoroughly debunked here):

Shortly after divorcing Barack Obama Sr., Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, married an Indonesian Muslim, Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo, whom she met — just as she had met Barack Sr. — when both were students at the University of Hawaii. At some point, Soetoro almost certainly adopted the youngster, who became known as “Barry Soetoro . . .”

Obama attended Indonesian elementary schools, which, in Suharto’s police state, were generally reserved for citizens (and students were required to carry identity cards that matched student registration information). The records of the Catholic school Obama/Soetoro attended for three years identify him as a citizen of Indonesia. Thus Obama probably obtained Indonesian citizenship through his adoption by Soetoro in Hawaii.

This “analysis” is based on a report from the epicenter of the ‘Birther’ conspiracy, World Net Daily, which relies on unnamed “Indonesian legal experts” (they have those on staff?) to determine if Obama qualified for Indonesian citizenship. You’ll forgive me if I don’t find this credible.

It gets better. McCarthy also cites Obama’s college trip to Pakistan as evidence of his Indonesian citizenship:

By contrast, the question whether Obama ever was an Indonesian citizen is still unresolved, as are such related matters as whether the foreign citizenship (if he had it) ever lapsed, and whether he ever held or used an Indonesian passport — for example, during a mysterious trip to Pakistan he took in 1981, after Zia’s coup, when advisories warned Americans against traveling there.

My mastery of a highly-specialized academic database has unearthed this obscure report, demonstrating that the travel ban story is complete nonsense State Department is complicit an a vast conspiracy to hide the truth about Obama’s citizenship:

“We have no record of any travel ban between America and Pakistan during that period or since,” said Noel Clay, a spokesman for the State Department.

There was no “travel advisory,” either. In fact, the U.S. consul general in Lahore was actively encouraging Americans to visit Pakistan in 1981.

Then there’s this gem from McCarthy (which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been retracted or even amended):

There’s speculation out there from the former CIA officer Larry Johnson — who is no right-winger and is convinced the president was born in Hawaii — that the full state records would probably show Obama was adopted by the Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro and became formally known as “Barry Soetoro.”

It’s true – Larry Johnson is no right-winger. He is also the crazed purveyor of the “whitey tapes,” which purported to show Michelle Obama going off on some crazed, racially-charged rant. Needless to say, these were never produced...

Daniel Larison: The Serious People And The Fringe

Eunomia » The Serious People And The Fringe: [I]t is somewhat misleading to refer to Palin as being on the “lunatic fringe.” Lunatic? Maybe. But whatever else her views are, they are definitely not on the fringe. In practice, as Scoblete notes, it is the advocates of a settlement freeze who are on the margins and the supporters of continued settlement in the territories who actually make policy. This is the way it has been for decades. Of course Palin’s statements on the subject are formulaic and betray her ignorance of the “basic nuances of the conflict.” First of all, she is repeating what her advisors and allies have told her to say about these things, and she is keeping her lines as simple as possible. What matters to her hawkish allies and her loyal followers is not whether she understands the issue. For these people, understanding and nuance are obstacles to be overcome. What matters is whether she adopts the correct pose. In this case, she has to strike the pose of being unflinchingly, reflexively supportive of Israel, and so she takes a maximalist position that secures her reputation as reliably “pro-Israel.” It makes no difference if the maximalist position she takes is actually worse for Israel in the long term. She has established the appearance of respecting Israel’s “rights” to do whatever it wants in contrast to an administration that her backers believe has been “bullying” Israel.

As a matter of internal Republican Party and movement politics, what Hounshell describes as lunacy is the consensus view on the right. This is why Huckabee’s earlier dabbling with neo-transferism isn’t the least bit surprising. We should also be a bit wary of invoking the authority of “serious people.” I think it is true that informed people understand why continued expansion of settlements is detrimental to the long-term interests of all parties, but after the last decade of terrible foreign policy guidance by self-proclaimed “serious people” there is hardly anything more damning one can say about something than to say that “serious people” embrace it.

There is a problem in hiding behind policy consensus and dismissing those outside it as an irrelevant fringe, and this is that the consensus gets important things wrong with remarkable frequency. Hawkish interventionists were able to create the (false) impression that 9/11 happened because America was too wedded to geopolitical stability and was too willing to tolerate authoritarian governments in the Near East, and then the lazy establishment consensus allowed itself to be dragged along with them to support an unnecessary and disastrous war. Establishment consensus views on Iraq and its weapon programs were wrong; consensus support for the bombardment of Lebanon and the Gaza operation was also wrong; the “serious” bipartisan consensus in favor of NATO expansion has been disastrously wrong. The trouble with Palin’s views on settlements and Israel-Palestine is not that they are on the fringe, but that they are as deeply misinformed about political realities in the region as so many of the consensus views mentioned above. As with all of those, it is the ill-informed and ideologically-driven position that prevails when it comes to policy decisions.