To note the obvious catch-up news from last night, the Waxman-Markey American Climate and Energy Security Act passes the House of Representatives late yesterday after a weird John Boehner effort at a quasi-filibuster. The bill has its shortcomings, but people should recognize an enormous achievement here by Henry Waxman, Ed Markey, and Nancy Pelosi all of whom drove this forward against fairly daunting odds. In my experience around Washington, DC exactly zero hack political consultants take the view that saving the world from catastrophic climate change is a clever thing for a politician to make a top priority. At the same time, speak to scientists across a variety of fields and they’ll all say that, as a matter of substance, saving the world from catastrophic climate change is the most important thing for politicians to make a top priority. Few politicians are inclined to choose the latter consideration over the former, but those three members of the House of Representatives did and thanks to their skill and determination have been able to pull off an important bill.

Now, of course, the legislation goes to the Senate which, historically speaking, is where good and important ideas have gone to die. Brad Plumer says “I’m not convinced this thing is dead in the Senate (more on that later), but it’s obviously a much steeper challenge.” That’s not reason for hope. The challenge in the House was pretty darn steep. At the end of the day, climate is just exactly the sort of issue where the American political system is well-designed to catastrophically screw up. The incentives are all horrible. Things will only happen if a certain number of people decide to step up, and behave in a statesmanlike manner. You don’t need 100 Senators to do that, but you do need more than zero.

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Michelle Goldberg had a very good column in TAP Online the other day about the debate in France over banning burqas:

Ultimately, though, there’s no evidence that most burqa-clad French women regard themselves as oppressed. “There are women who wear burqas who are not being forced by anyone, who think that form of modesty is appropriate for who they want to be in the world,” says Scott. “It’s hard to distinguish between them and those who are being forced.” And so in the end, a ban putatively passed to further women’s rights could instead impinge on their freedom, and take from them something they value. Even worse, it could lead to those in the most fundamentalist of households being trapped inside their homes altogether. It would be cruel to limit these women’s options in the name of liberation, even if their clothes are a rebuke to the secularism that the French rightly hold sacred.

Putting her points on this together in a slightly different way, this sort of ban seems extremely unlikely to actually help anyone who’s genuinely in need of help. A woman whose husband and/or other male relations have enough power over her to force her into a burqa against her will is only going to be forced by those same men further underground by this sort of rule. The only kind of person who would be genuinely unveiled by this kind of legal measure would be someone with enough autonomy to be in a position to choose compliance with the law over compliance with tradition. The French have a strong tradition not just of secularism, but of a kind of illiberal egalitarianism that holds that everyone should really be the same, and I think it tends to push them toward measures like this that don’t ultimately help anyone.

Via Alex Tabarrok, the crew of Aghion, Algan, Cahuc and Shleifer shows that there’s more regulation in countries with higher overall levels of distrust:

It’s hard to know how you create and sustain high levels of trust, but my understanding is that there’s lots of research indicating the positive social benefits of trust. As Tabarrok says:

Crucially, when people distrust others they invest not in the highest return projects but in human and physical capital that is complementary to distrust–for example, they invest in human capital that helps them bond with their group/tribe/family rather than in human capital that helps them to bond with “outsiders” and they invest in physical capital that is more difficult to expropriate rather than in easier to expropriate capital, even though in both cases the latter investments may be the all-else-equal higher return investments.

Consequently, some of the apparent benefits of low levels of regulation may in fact be benefits of high levels of trust. At the same time, insofar as low levels of trust drive people to embrace regulatory solutions they’re likely to be disappointed.