Yesterday there was an interesting outbreak of libertarian praise from a couple of Cato scholars for our neighbor to the North, citing not only Canada’s more liberal policies on cultural issues, but touting Canada as a libertarian economic model. It’s worth noting, however, that one important driver behind Canada’s ability to adopt this policy model is that the Canadian health care system, much-derided by the American right, is much much cheaper than the American system. If we had Canadian-style health care costs and Canadian-style trajectory of cost growth, we wouldn’t be facing nearly the same upward pressure on taxes.

It’s also worth considering that the guarantee of equal health care no matter what happens to you probably helps build political support for measures that Cato and I both support like liberalized trade and immigration policies. Another thing that’s alluded to in the Cato post but not really spelled out is that though Canada has cut tax rates recently, they have far fewer tax loopholes and deductions. In this regard, I think Canada really is a good model for the United States to follow. But the congress hasn’t exactly been leaping at the opportunity to adopt Barack Obama’s proposals to trim deductions for high-income individuals or to close loopholes for corporations.

In response to a question I asked, Dana Goldstein and Ann Friedman offer up a very interesting discussion of gender, finance, and the financial crisis:

One thing they mention is this study showing that women are, on average, better investors than men. What’s more, my understanding is that there’s actually quite a lot of research demonstrating that women are, on average, better at risk-assessment. For example, women are much less likely to get into car accidents and nobody has any plausible theory of what compensating benefits men are receiving in exchange for our riskier driving.

It’s interesting to consider this, and then consider how male-dominated finance is, and then ponder what that tells us. It probably tells us something about a sexist culture and institutionalized gender discrimination on Wall Street. But it probably also tells us something about inefficiency in the whole market segment.

Jeffrey Toobin offers a surprisingly hard-edged assessment of the Chief Justice for a New Yorker article:

Roberts’s hard-edged performance at oral argument offers more than just a rhetorical contrast to the rendering of himself that he presented at his confirmation hearing. “Judges are like umpires,” Roberts said at the time. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

Which I guess is fine. Except insofar as judging I don’t approve of isn’t fine. But I expect presidents I don’t approve of to appoint judges I don’t approve of. What’s not fine was the kind of bizarre slobbering over Roberts from the establishment that preceded his confirmation. It would be one thing if the sensible center had just been saying “look liberals, you have to suck it up; Bush won the election so he’ll get to appoint right-wing judges.” Instead, we were treated to gushing coos over Roberts’ brilliance and moderation for which there was never any evidence.

Nobody wrote any prominent articles slamming him as an intellectual mediocrity who owed his advancement to a certain generic white male handsomeness and his role as a loyal foot soldier in a powerful political movement. I’m not sure it would have made any practical difference in the world if commentators had taken a more realistic view at Roberts back then. But still, folks who called this all wrong would be a lot more credible if they would make some kind of account.

It’s easy to make striking claims about the decline in Republican Party self-identification over the past eight years. Their problem, maybe, is that they’ve lost the support of married people—down five points. Or maybe the problem is that they’re down six points in the west. But the real problem is that the decline is so across-the-board that it’s easy to pull facts out of context. What I think is interesting to do is understand that the overall Republican decline in self-identification has been five percentage points, so then we can try to set that as the baseline and see where their declines have been concentrated. Here, for example, are the normalized declines by age cohort:

The sinking tide brought the GOP down among all groups. But relative to the average, the Republicans are declining a lot among young voters whereas senior citizens are (relatively!) non-disillusioned. Similarly, the Republicans declined by a less-than-average amount from their already low standing among non-whites. The decline among the (substantially larger) group of whites was, by contrast, a bit sharper than average.