Will Wilkinson is curious about “what Matt takes to be the broader implications of the idea that ‘we’re fated to be ruled by the sort of people who are really desperate to cling to power.’”

I’m not entirely sure. I know some people are inclined to respond to these facts by saying “and so you see, that’s why we should believe in small government and limit the power of politicians” but I don’t really understand how to operationalize that idea. The only practical alternative to rule by politicians is rule by dictators, which seems to work out well in Singapore but not elsewhere, and the election of politicians who profess belief in small government has, in practice, brought the United States illegal surveillance, torture, indefinite detention, aggressive war, a boondogglish drug benefit for senior citizens, and then on the small government side of the ledger cuts in the very inoffensive Section 8 housing voucher program.

But a few thoughts:

Read more

I appreciate the points that the Great Orange Satan and Glenn Greenwald are making about Jon Chait’s flip-flops on the subject of Joe Lieberman and ideological purges. But this strikes me as a time when it might be a good idea to just take “yes” for an answer. If you make groveling apologies your price for admitting converts, you’re going to find yourself running a small church.

That said, I don’t think it’s been generally acknowledged how much damage the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to aggressively back Ned Lamont in the 2006 general election has wound up doing to the cause of progressive politics. The issue has less to do with the specific malfeasance of Lieberman than with the consequences for party discipline. If you can go so far as to lose a Democratic primary and run against the Democratic Party’s nominee and still not get kneecapped by the leaders of your party, then of course you’ll feel no compunction about joining opposition party procedural obstruction and all the rest. The only way for a party to transform election results into policy outcomes is via some mechanisms of discipline, and the Democratic Senate caucus operates with no such mechanisms. And it does so because even the more liberal Senators—including, in his day, Barack Obama—show no inclination to make the kind of personal sacrifices that building an effective caucus would entail.

The selfishness per se isn’t all that surprising, but the Republicans actually operate under different rules so it’s not impossible for things to change.

Mohammed Fahim in 2004 (wikimedia)

Mohammad Qasim Fahim was Ahmed Shah Massoud’s successor as the top Tajik military commander in Afghanistan. He served as Defense Minister in the initial interim administration of post-Taliban Afghanistan, and then when Hamid Karzai ran for his first term as president backed Karzai’s main rival (a Tajik) and was sidelined from the first Karzai administration. But facing a stronger electoral challenge the second time around from another Tajik, Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai reasonably chose to try to broaden his electoral appeal by bringing Fahim back into his coalition as a Vice Presidential candidate. Fahim has also spent considerably more time fighting the Taliban than any American on the planet, dating way back to the mid-1990s.

He’s also, it seems, heavily involved in drug trafficking and apparently the US government is considering going after him.

Maybe I just have a soft spot in my heart for Tajik warlords, but this seems mildly insane. We recall from The Wire that when the Baltimore Police Department succeeded in taking down the Barksdale crew this didn’t make demand for illegal narcotics suddenly vanish. What happened instead was that putting a major drug supplier out of business proved to be a boon to rival drug operations. The situation in Afghanistan seems to be precisely the same. The only sources of non-trivial revenue in Afghanistan are drug trafficking and American aid money. The Taliban doesn’t get any American aid money, so they rely on drug trafficking. And drug trafficking is lucrative because lots of people outside of Afghanistan are addicted to heroin. Apparently, Marshall Fahim also gets money from drug trafficking. But taking him out doesn’t eliminate the demand for drugs. And it doesn’t reduce the supply of drugs available to the Taliban. Instead, it puts the Taliban’s competition out of business, thus increasing their revenues.

As an added bonus, it’ll create huge new political headaches for Karzai!

(cc photo by DeclanTM)

It’s famously difficult to fire public school teachers once they’ve gotten it through their first couple of years on the job. This leads to a lot of problems for kids, and sometimes to wacky scenarios like New York’s “rubber rooms.” That said, as Kevin Drum says even though the private sector is formally very different, in practice it often seems quite similar:

On the other hand, I’d also say that, at least in the places I’m familiar with, virtually everyone who got fired was let go within the first year or two they were with the company. Very few who had been around for more than three years got fired. On the third hand, occasional layoffs often provided excuses to get rid of poor performers, so perhaps that shrank the pool of people who would otherwise have eventually been axed.

I think the evidence suggests that layoffs are playing a pretty big role here. A big part of the story of recent business cycles is the rise of the “jobless recovery” in which the employment-population ratio doesn’t start rising until long after GDP has pulled out from its trough. Another way of putting this is that recessions are now associated with spikes in the average productivity of the workforce. It would be extremely strange if that was because economic distress was leading people to invent better stuff. It’s much more plausible, however, that when economic distress forces managers to lay people off they take the opportunity to clear out some of the dead wood.

Related to that, it’s clear that the nature of contemporary office works affords a large slice of the workforce with ample opportunities to waste time while at work. That, in essence, is the economic foundation of the blogosphere. But layoffs could also very plausibly reduce wastage of time since people don’t want to look like dead wood.

The application of this to education policy seems limited, since there are perfectly sound macroeconomic reasons to discourage states from engaging in pro-cyclical teacher layoffs during recessions. That said, big recessions normally do lead to some teacher layoffs, and as Robin Chait argues here the layoff procedure is normally done with no attention whatsoever to teacher quality, which is not a very good idea. For the economy as a whole, I think it mostly means that we’ll need loose monetary policy for a good long while now.