Apparently fear of torture prosecutions is keeping George W Bush out of Switzerland. Couldn’t have happened to a worse president.

At any rate, I want Bush and other high-ranking current, former, and future American officials to know that Switzerland is a lovely country and my personal advice is that you should try and avoid doing anything that you think is likely to constrain your future travel for fear of war crimes prosecutions.

There’s a lot of support in Washington, DC for the idea of raising the retirement age. And the case for doing so is pretty clear. Thanks to declining birth rates, the elderly share of the population is projected to rise and this necessarily creates some policy dilemmas. On top of the birth rate issue, we also have the problem of expanded life expectancy. People living longer sounds good, but the trouble is that when the ratio of retired years to working years increases, the ratio of consumers to producers also increases. That means declining living standards, either in the form of reduced annual benefits or higher taxes. A higher retirement age would halt the ratio shift.

Of course a little-explored alternative possibility would be to simply set a “maximum age” so as to prevent any such increase. We could reverse current plans to raise the retirement age to 67, and just cap human life at 80 years. Everyone would get a maximum of 15 years of retirement. This has all the economic advantages of raising the retirement age plus several additional advantages:

— Since life expectancy correlates with income, my proposal does a much better job of safeguarding the interests of the most vulnerable citizens.

— Maximum age would substantially “bend the curve” of economy-wide health care costs, which a higher retirement age leaves almost entirely unchecked.

— Maximum age would allow us to reap major efficiency advantages in terms of retirement planning and portfolio allocation strategy.

— Since health tends to decline with age, capping the number of retired years though a maximum age policy gives you more QUALYs of retirement than does achieving an equivalent retirement length via a higher retirement age.

— By tackling the production:consumption ratio directly on the consumption side, maximum age is much greener than efforts to increase production.

Next time one of the haters wants to deliberately miss the point, I hope he’ll read this post.

The interesting case of Rupert Murdoch employee Bill Kristol pointing out that Rupert Murdoch employee Glenn Beck is being nutty about Egypt puts me in mind of the coming 2012 GOP primaries. That’s because, basically, this kind of disagreement from inside the News Corporation borg is relatively rare and, in principle, one could put a stop to it.

Students of American politics have the idea of an “invisible primary” that occurs before official nomination contests start. This is a war to garner the support of various party elites, party-aligned interest groups, contribution bundlers, etc. This is a fascinating process because it’s traditionally so diffuse. DC movers and shakers matter a lot, but so do New Hampshire state senators and highly energetic local Iowa activists.

But the conservative media is both very influential and also at this point pretty highly concentrated. Consider, for example, the case of John Thune. Thune voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which won’t be a very popular item on his record. But I’m sure he has some hand-wavy explanation for why this doesn’t impugne his conservative credentials. Will people buy this? I think the question comes down largely to whether or not Fox News as an institution buys it. If the Weekly Standard says Thune is a true-blue conservative and Fox News agrees and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck also espouse this view on their radio shows (two of the top five in the country) then that’s almost a consensus right there. If Rush Limbaugh insists that these guys are all wrong, and someone else is the real conservative, then that guys got a fighting chance. But Rush + News Corp is a juggernaut that would be pretty hard to stop if the interest is there in really picking someone. Of course, the interest might not be there—I could see taking the view that a stance of studied neutrality is the way to go. But the larger point is that to a great extent the dynamic duo of Roger Ailes and Limbaugh basically just get to decide among the two of them which positions count as authentically conservative.

It’s fascinating to me the extent to which economists refuse to deploy the insights of economics in order to help understand the behavior of economists and economics departments. For example, Tyler Cowen says Ragu Rajan “nails it” with his explanation of why economists didn’t predict the crisis:

I would argue that three factors largely explain our collective failure: specialization, the difficulty of forecasting, and the disengagement of much of the profession from the real world.

Rajan glosses a leading alternative hypothesis thusly:

Finally, an answer that is gaining ground is that the system bribed economists to stay silent.

Obviously bribe-based theories of human behavior are crude and rarely capture reality. But how about translating this into economics? How about incentives? Rajan says it’s not individual corruption that led to a lack of insight, it’s structure features of the way the profession is organized. That makes a lot of sense to me. But what explains that structural organization? Is it really unrelated to the financial basis of the economics profession? Or are economists supposed to be immune from the factors that influence human behavior in other instances?

If so, I’d like to meet these people! In journalism, I think most people want to do a good job and produce good articles. But people also want to get raises, get better jobs, get invited to cool events with important people, get on TV and be famous, etc. Nobody’s “on the take” but the objective structure of incentives does influence what happens, especially in the aggregate. College professors are different, I guess, which must be why they’re all paid on a flat salary scale and everyone donates 80-90 percent of their outside consulting income to charities.

Egypt looks certain to have a change in President as a result of the current protests, which is all to the good. But if you ask me, countries in this situation should also strongly consider doing away with their dictatorship-enabling presidential systems.

The problem with a strong president, especially in a country that doesn’t have a stable tradition of political parties or peaceful transfers of power, is that there can only be one. The whole country is plunged into a winner-take-all political contest. If the winner turns out to be someone with a “one man, one vote, one time” concept of democracy, then that’s all she wrote. And if you suspect your opponent is someone with a “one man, one vote, one time” concept of democracy, then you’ll feel it’s both prudent and necessary to really push the envelop in search of your own victory. And of course if you’ve got that figured out then so does your opponent. It’s a recipe for suspicion and abuse.

By contrast, a system oriented around a parliament elected with some form of proportional representation is going to set the stage for new round of bargaining among political elites. That doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, but it does militate in that direction.