Cross the Streams

Not that it's all that important but today for the first time in a year, the Pollster aggregate of polls on the health care law has seen the "favor" and "oppose" lines cross.

Wonkipedia

Wonk

n. a person who studies a subject or issue in an excessively assiduous and thorough manner: a policy wonk.

Earlier today, Ezra Klein posted about the lack of a place to direct people who want a comprehensive background and overview of public debates:

If I edited a major publication -- or even a medium-size one -- I would begin each major legislative battle by detailing a few of my smartest, clearest writers to create a hyperlinked, fairly comprehensive, summary of the basic legislation. That summary would be updated throughout the process, and it would be linked in every single story written on the topic. As reader questions came in, and points of confusion arose, it would be expanded, so by the end, you'd have a document that was current, comprehensive, navigable and responsive to the questions people actually had about the legislation. Telling people what just happened is undeniably important, but given that most people aren't following that closely, we in the media need to do a better job of telling people what's been happening.

Some of the commenters on that post expressed interest in a wiki run by policy wonks. I like the idea. Wikipedia is great in general but unreliable on policy issues. The page on the earned income tax credit is pretty good, though anything can be improved. But if you want to know more about EPSDT, the child's Medicaid benefit, the wiki on it won't be very helpful.

I know of at least one policy-specific wiki for which content can only be added by wonks--in fact, I'm an editor. But that's a government-sponsored project on a specific subject, not a general compendium of all policy knowledge on every area.

A true wonkipedia would have in-depth information on everything from Medicaid managed care to the merits and intellectual history of the carbon tax. Like all wikis, it would be accessible to everyone but also capable of delving as deeply into the subject as one wishes. There seems to be a disturbing popular lack of knowledge not only of general policy subjects ("keep your government hands off my Medicare!") but also of things like government procedure (yes, everyone in the U.S. will have the opportunity to offer comments on proposed regulations for health care drawn up by HHS if they so choose).

I like knowing how things work and since that's essential to understanding policy, practical political knowledge would have to be part of any complete wonkipedia. As would relevant historical knowledge on various policy issues. The question is whether such a resource would be useful. Perhaps most people don't really care about the nuts and bolts of policy or government and most of those who do care already know what they want to know and wouldn't need a wonkipedia. On the other hand, I know I would find such a resource to be extremely useful and endlessly fascinating. The media is hopelessly inept (and shallow) at covering the necessary background to the policy issue du jour. Even when the debate drags on for 9 months (after a 2-year political campaign in which the relevant issue played a prominent role) as with health care, people are both confused and poorly served by journalists who don't seem to have much more of a grasp of the relevant information then those they seek to inform.

I'd love to see this resource developed (I'd even love to help). The biggest problem is that the domain is currently populated with this.

Is anyone else intrigued by this idea or would it be just too wonky and inaccessible?

Puppy thrown at German biker gang

This is just too good not to share:

A German student "mooned" a group of Hell's Angels and hurled a puppy at them before escaping on a stolen bulldozer, police have said.

The man drove up to a Hell's Angels clubhouse near Munich, wearing only a pair of shorts and carrying a puppy. He dropped his shorts and threw the dog, escaping on a bulldozer from a nearby building site. He was arrested later at home by police.

The 26-year-old is said to have stopped taking depression medication. After making his getaway on the bulldozer, he had driven so slowly that a 5km tailback built up behind him on the motorway.

After driving about 1km, he had abandoned the bulldozer in the middle of the motorway, near Allershausen. He continued his journey by hitchhiking.

"What motivated him to throw a puppy at the Hell's Angels is currently unclear," a police spokesman said. The puppy is now being cared for in an animal shelter.

I do not condone throwing puppies at biker gangs, but this is the most absurd thing I've read in the news in a long time.

I've always tried to remain as environmentally conscious as possible in my actions, and as a result I'm almost exclusively pro-green in my views on politics and social issues. I love organic foods, I'm strongly in favor of attempts to reduce carbon emissions, and I constantly strive to find that perfect mix of efficiency, productivity, and sustainability in all aspects of life (including farming). So far in my life, these personal standards have usually gone hand-in-hand with one another. But like most issues in the world, there are always constant reminders that things are rarely black and white and never easy. A U.S. study recently made the claim that our modern intensive agriculture methods that came about from the Green Revolution in the 1960s (when new high-yield crops were developed to make formerly poor farming regions like India and South America suddenly fertile) has actually saved the planet large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, despite a heavier dependence on chemical and energy inputs.

At first this seems backwards, that requiring more energy and chemicals nets you less emissions. However, older methods of farming require much larger tracts of land to produce the same yields as the modern methods used in commercial agriculture (the food most of us buy when we go to the supermarket). To quote the article,

"Farming this way would have required less energy and use of chemicals such as fertilisers, whose production involves emissions of CO2 and whose use generates nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas. However, additional emissions from the extra land clearance, releasing carbon stored in trees and soil, would have been the more important factor by far."

To us environmentalists (as amateur as I may be), this raises quite a dilemma. Organic farming (or older methods which still use inputs like pesticides but in smaller amounts) is less destructive to the environment in terms of poisoning the landscape and, potentially, ourselves; but since organic farms prohibit use of pesticides and most fertilizers, they generally require larger tracts of land to be cleared to produce comparable yields to modern techniques and thus contribute more to global warming.

It seems to me the solution to this dilemma might be the old adage "all things in moderation". From everything I've read over the years, there are some things that are really ok to buy commercially. On the other hand, there are some foods that I've heard you should always buy organic, such as peaches, bell peppers, and potatoes. (I really like this article of foods with the most as well as those with the least amount of pesticide residue, although the ads are a tad annoying). Of course it's always good to cut greenhouse gases, but at the same time I think it's important to reduce as many toxins entering the body as possible. What I really hope to avoid, though, is another "Penn and Teller: Recycling is Bullshit" scenario, where people get hold of a few facts on an issue and immediately polarize to one end or the other. The interplay between farming and the environment is complex and there is no 100% correct course of action to take, but that doesn't mean one side or the other is devoid of merit. So go out and buy some generic supermarket wheat bread and get hold of some organic peach jam, and have yourself a snack; on this issue, sometimes you can have the best of both worlds.

Your guess is better than mine

Apparently the "his word against mine" de facto law regarding traffic violations wasn't quite good enough: the Ohio Supreme Court just made it de jure recently by allowing police officers to issue speeding tickets based on visual estimate only.

The real irony here is that in this case the officer estimated the driver was going 73 mph, while the radar said 83 mph. However, since the officer wasn't trained on how to operate a radar the reading was tossed out in court and instead they used his estimate to obtain a conviction, which itself only proved that officers can be as off in their guess as 10 miles per hour. Whether or not this particular officer was trained (he's not a rookie, he's been on the force since 1995) it certainly casts a shadow of doubt on the court's claim that police officers could not possibly be wrong.

Note: edited the link to bring you to the top of the page.

Housekeeping

For no good reason, I've gone back and put tags on a number of old posts. I haven't tagged everything, just a decent number. The main tags I'm using are Policy, politics, Science Fiction, Sports, and Physics. Feel free to generate your own as appropriate in future posts.

The H-Team

Ever wonder who's going to be on the front lines of health reform, helping states navigate largely uncharted territory? Who, if you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, might you hire? Turns out there's a crack commando unit on the case:

The State Consortium on Health Care Reform Implementation (State Consortium) was formed to provide coordinated and trusted information to states concerning the implementation of federal health reforms. The goals of the consortium are to provide states with technical assistance about requirements, offer options and best practices, and synthesize feedback to federal agencies on issues that affect state implementation. [...]

The State Consortium will focus on aspects of the health reform law that are likely to have the biggest effect on states – the Medicaid expansion, the establishment of health insurance exchanges, insurance regulations, and delivery system initiatives, along with important governance, coordination and timing issues for states. Resources in each of these areas are available here and on each of the Consortium members' websites.

Who is this fabulous foursome?

The National Governors Association

The leader of the H-Team, he is a brilliant tactician and a master of disguise. He is distinguished by his cigar smoking, black gloves, disguises, and his catch phrase, "I love it when a plan comes together." Always "on the jazz," he is the lobbying arm of the nation's governors, a key public policy liaison between the state governments and the federal government. He also works as an actor, playing monsters in low-budget horror movies.

The National Association of Insurance Commissions

Suave, smooth-talking, and hugely successful with women, he serves as the team's con man and scrounger, able to get his hands on just about anything they need. Effectively second in command, he is the one who arranges for supplies, equipment, and sensitive information using numerous scams and hustles. He's also responsible for the creation of model laws and regulations to benefit state regulators and insurance consumers by promoting uniform laws and regulations.

The National Association of State Medicaid Directors

A highly-skilled mechanic and the H-Team's regular Mr. Fix-It, he serves as a focal point of communication between the states and the federal government, and provides an information network among the states on issues pertinent to the Medicaid program. He is a skilled fighter and is easily roused to anger, earning him the nickname "Bad Attitude". Despite his reputed attitude, he is a nice guy at heart. He has a special fondness for children and never drinks alcohol, preferring milk instead.

The Nat'l Academy for State Health Policy

The best chopper pilot of the Vietnam War, he is either mentally unstable or exceptionally good at pretending to be so. He is an expert at convening state leaders, conducting policy analysis and research, disseminating relevant information, and providing technical assistance. The symptoms of his "insanity" varies from episode to episode, and the nickname "Howlin' Mad" is attributed to him. The best one, obviously.

According to the CBO, JCT, the CMS Actuary, and policy analysts from across the ideological spectrum, we can expect health reform implementation to look something like this:

How's It Playing in Piore (-a)?

There was an interesting post today on Ezra Klein's blog about the education differential in the current unemployment statistics. In short, the less educated the strata of society you look at, the harder it's being hit by the recession:



The specter of an extended period of abnormally high joblessness has been hovering over this economic recovery for months now. We're no longer in a recession (GDP has been growing for three straight quarters, and presumably GDP is also growing in the quarter that will conclude at the end of this month), yet, despite an occasional encouraging sign, unemployment remains persistently high. And not just in the sense of a great many people being unemployed in any given month; the ranks of the long-term unemployed (technically, people who are out of work for 12 months or more) don't seem to be thinning. We're reminded of this every month when Congress votes to extend unemployment insurance to people for whom it should've long ago expired. Take it look at this disheartening poll from Rutgers showing what had happened by March of this year to people who were out of work last August:



When I saw that graphic comparing unemployment rates across education levels, I was reminded of an idea first introduced four decades ago by Michael Piore: the notion of the dual labor market. You can read about it in 3-ish short pages in "The Dual Labor Market: Theory and Implications" (incidentally my copy of the Grusky reader somehow disappeared a while ago--I'm still pissed about that). At the risk of oversimplifying, Piore essentially breaks up the labor market into "good jobs" (the primary market) and "bad jobs" (the secondary sector):

One sector of the market, which I have termed elsewhere the primary market, offers jobs which possess several of the following traits: high wages, good working conditions, employment stability and job security, equity and due process in the administration of work rules, and chances for advancement. The secondary sector has job that are decidedly less attractive, compared with those in the primary sector. They tend to involve low wages, poor working conditions, considerable variability in employment, harsh and often arbitrary discipline, and little opportunity to advance.

An extra degree of gradation is added by the inclusion of an intermediary labor market (jobs somewhere between the really good and the really bad) but it's still a picture of the labor market that easily could have been taken by Ansel Adams. In part, the dual labor market model is a theory of poverty, as indicated in that linked piece where Piore points out that "The poor are confined to the secondary labor market. Eliminating poverty requires that they gain access to primary employment." More broadly, it's a powerful account of inequality and stratification in employment. Moreover, it makes sense intuitively and experientially.

Since the less-educated are much more likely to end up in the secondary sector than in the primary market, the graph up top seems to be indicating that the recession is falling especially heavily on the secondary sector, which you can see from the graph isn't historically all that unusual. College graduates, on the other hand, always seem to have the best prospects. Even now, when the unemployment rate for college grads is higher than at any time on that graph (i.e. since 1992), it's still only around 5%. Of course, that graph only measures U3 unemployment so it doesn't account for people who get discouraged and drop out of the labor force or are doing part-time work or are otherwise underemployed. But the reality remains that people groomed for the primary market tend to weather the economic storm much better than those confined to the secondary market.

But with warnings of prolonged joblessness and an emerging consensus that this recovery isn't going to look like the recoveries we're used to, one has to wonder how returning jobs are going to be stratified. Is the blue line in that graph--people with less than a high-school education, prime suspects for secondary sector participation--going to plateau while the others gradually come down? Or will all four lines slowly sink together? Call me pessimistic but it doesn't seem all that likely to me that a rising tide will lift all boats here; it seems likely that the tide will be a little more discerning. And that's probably not good news for people in the secondary market.

In fairness, there is one more level of stratification--within college grads--that's worth pointing out. Despite "glimmers of hope" for new college grads this year, recent graduates are not faring as well as older or more experienced college grads:

Thomas J. Nardone, an assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said that the jobless rate for college graduates under age 25 was 8 percent in April, up from 6.8 percent in April 2009 and 3.7 percent in April 2007, before the recession began.

So things certainly aren't as bright for our cohort of college grads as they are for college grads in general. But the prospects are still much better for young 20-something degree-holders than they are for captives of the secondary market.