Not the most repugnant, but certainly the most bizarre, aspect of the most recent twists in the torture debate has been the willingness of the press to take seriously the argument that criminals who also happen to be CIA employees should not be held account for breaking the law because holding them to account might discourage them from breaking the law in the future. To wit:

Krongard, one of the few active or retired CIA officers with direct knowledge of the program willing to voice publicly what many officers are saying privately, said agency personnel now may back away from controversial programs that could place them in personal legal jeopardy should their work be exposed. “The old saying goes, ‘Big operation, big risk; small operation, small risk; no operation, no risk.’”

“If you’re not in the intelligence business to be forward-leaning, you might as well not be in it,” Krongard said.

If one of the higher-ups at CAP asked me to do something that could place me in personal legal jeopardy, I would back away from doing it. That might be unfortunate for my would-be law-breaking boss, but from a social point of view this is the whole reason we have laws. If my bosses want me to commit a crime on their behalf, we as a society want me to say “sorry, I don’t want to go to jail.” But the view of the intelligence community seems to be that it would be a huge problem if this same principle applied to the CIA. Instead, they think people should feel that there will be no consequences for following illegal orders. That way, people will be more likely to follow illegal orders in the future!

It’s completely insane. But I think that direct quote from Krongard captures the essence of a mindset that seems dangerous prevalent in the intelligence world—the idea that breaking the law is their job, and that anyone who expects them to do otherwise is just being naive.

The New York Times editorializes in favor of Democrats taking a good hard look at doing what they can on health care through the budget reconciliation process. Sounds good to me. They characterize this as “Majority Rule on Health Care Reform” which would, in fact, be nice. But when it comes to the United States Senate it is always worth recalling that majority rule is a funny concept.

If you attribute to each Senator half the population of the state he or she represents, then the Democrats’ two Senators from California, two from New York, one from Florida, two from Illinois, two from Pennsylvania, one from Ohio, two from Michigan, one from North Carolina, two from New Jersey, two from Virginia, two from Washington, two from Massachusetts, one from Indiana, one from Missouri, and two from Maryland together represent 51.125 percent of the American people. That’s just 25 Senators. There are an additional 35 Democratic Party Senators. Legislation by “majority rule” would mean something less like “50 Senators get to make laws” than “the House of Representatives gets to make laws.” And keep in mind that for all the problems with Barack Obama’s strategy and all the perfidy of the right-wing and all the fecklessness of the media and all the ineffectualness of the Democratic Party leadership, if we operated on a majority rules system of government we’d be having a very different conversation. Absent the Senate, the American Climate and Energy Security Act would be law. And absent the Senate we would have a health care bill financed through taxes on the wealthy providing subsidies for families up to 400 percent of the poverty line, and creating a somewhat robust public option.

Now, obviously, that’s not the country we live in and everyone knew the Senate existed before we started down this road. But it’s absolutely crucial to understand that our political institutions are shaping these outcomes much more heavily than are individual tactical decisions.

Karen DeYoung reports that the administration is getting ready to reveal them:

The White House has assembled a list of about 50 measurements to gauge progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan as it tries to calm rising public and congressional anxiety about its war strategy.

Administration officials are conducting what one called a “test run” of the metrics, comparing current numbers in a range of categories — including newly trained Afghan army recruits, Pakistani counterinsurgency missions and on-time delivery of promised U.S. resources — with baselines set earlier in the year. The results will be used to fine-tune the list before it is presented to Congress by Sept. 24.

I think writing down metrics is a good exercise primarily because it requires you to get clearer about what you’re trying to do. “Winning” is great, but it’s important to attach some more specific content to that idea. That said, defining metrics naturally raises the question of what do you do if you’re not meeting them. Change your approach? Abandon the goals? For example, we want to see less corruption in the Karzai government. But maybe 18 months from now, it’ll be slightly more corrupt. What happens then? Do we say, “Well, you guys are corrupt and obstinate so we’re through with you?” Or do we start trying to poke around and bring different leaders to office?

At any rate, can’t have metrics-blogging without Metric videos. This is “Succexy”:

Good times.

Japan is kind of an odd duck among the world’s democracies in that they have most of the trappings of parliamentary democracy, but when all is said and done the same party always wins. Since 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party has consistently held power except for one brief 11 month spell during which an opposition coalition controlled things. But today that’s changing as the opposition Democratic Party of Japan has swept to a clear win in parliamentary elections and already controls the upper house. Yukio Hatoyama will take over as Prime Minister.

One consequence of this prolonged period of one-party rule is that the LDP is not an especially ideological political party. It’s essentially a “party of government” patronage machine that contains diverse factions and different points of view. The Democratic Party, consequently, is more of a generic umbrella opposition grouping than a clear ideological alternative. Thus the Democrats are riding in on a tide of public discontent, but don’t seem to have articulated much in the way of a policy agenda beyond the obscure issue of bureaucracy reform. The thing that strikes outsiders about Japan is that they should probably let more immigrants in but no Japanese people seem to like that idea.

Whenever people say they’re “against” cost-benefit analysis as a method for evaluating policy initiatives or regulatory schemes, they appear to be talking in paradox. To say that you think something is a good idea more or less just means that you think the benefits of doing it would outweigh the costs of doing it. So pretty much any proposal for changing the way these things are evaluated amounts to a proposal to “mend but don’t end” the practice of cost-benefit analysis. That said, the current way of doing things has a number of very serious flaws. Mark Kleiman offers up three here but let me just site the most egregious one:

Formal benefit cost analysis counts everyone’s gains and losses equally. But common sense and the principle of diminishing marginal utility agree that a dollar’s worth of gain is more valuable to someone with few dollars than it is with someone with many. Obviously, taking $1 each from 900,000 poor people to give $1 million to a hedge-fund billionaire doesn’t reflect a social gain, but a formal benefit-cost analysis will show that it does: after all, the net benefit is $100,000. Thus gains and losses should be adjusted by (at least) dividing each gain or loss by the income or wealth of the person bearing it, so that a $20 gain to a family with an income of $20,000 weighs as a heavily as a $10,000 gain to a family with an income of $1 million.

This is a very common pathology of economic analysis. As Brad DeLong points out in this Socratic dialogue what passes for “value-neutral” positive economics in fact embeds some very strong and perverse ideas about value:

Agathon: “That means that the market system, in weighting utilities and adding them up, gives you a much lower utility than it gives Richard Cheney. In fact, if marginal utility of wealth is inversely proportional to the square of lifetime wealth, the market system gives Richard Cheney about 400 times as big a weight as it gives you.”

Glaukon: “That’s sick.”

Agathon: “And it gives Bill Gates a weight about 400,000,000 times as big a weight as it gives you.”

Glaukon: “That’s sicker.”

Agathon: “But it gives you about 40,000 times the weight it gives your average Bengali peasant, who thus has about 1/16,000,000,000,000 the amount of the market system’s concern as Bill Gates has. Will you teach that?”

And:

Glaukon: “We are value neutral economists! We don’t care about distribution! We care about efficiency!”

Agathon: “But claiming that you don’t care about distribution is implicitly saying that shifts in distribution are of no account–which can be true only if the social welfare function gives everybody a weight inversely proportional to their marginal utility of wealth.”

Glaukon: “You’re introducing politics into a value-neutral technocratic social science.”

Now as it happens it’s not 100 percent clear what alternative rule you should use. Which I think is one reason economists remain attracted to the “distribution doesn’t matter” point of view. It’s false to say that distribution doesn’t matter. But if you choose to believe that distribution doesn’t matter, that provides an unequivocal answer to how you ought to build distribution into your analysis. If you decide, accurately, that distribution does matter you’re left with the tough problem of specifying exactly how it matters. Much easier to just pretend it doesn’t matter, and then pretending that the fact that you’re pretending it doesn’t matter doesn’t matter either because it’s a “value-neutral” point-of-view. But it just isn’t/