Broom of the System

This column is mostly about national politics and that my coursework tends more toward abstract issues in moral philosophy—the two do not tend to intersect often. So much so, in fact, that the philosopher with whom I most consistently agree—the 19th century Cambridge utilitarian Henry Sidgwick—held views on real-life politics that bordered on the repugnant. He, in sharp contrast to previous utilitarians, was deeply skeptical of large-scale political and economic reforms, and argued that adherence with Victorian social mores was required by the principle of utility. He even once attended a lecture on land reform by the socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw and, after Shaw finished speaking, rose to respond, stated that Shaw “advocated nationalization of land; that nationalization of land was a crime; and that he [Sidgwick] would not take part in a discussion of a criminal proposal,” and sat right back down again.

But Sidgwick also wrote brilliantly and rigorously about moral philosophy, and in particular about one specific problem that has come to mind often as I consider, two weeks before graduation, what Harvard has come to mean to me. Sidgwick once jokingly noted that he had written a book where the first word was “ethics” and the last word was “failure.” What he was referring to was his conclusion to The Methods of Ethics: that there was no way to prove that one should act a utilitarian (that is, on behalf of the well-being of all) rather than as an egoist (on the behalf of only one’s own well-being). They both appeared to be rational positions, and Sidgwick could not for the life of him prove that one has more reason to be a utilitarian than an egoist.

For most people living in England at Sidgwick’s time, this did not present much of a problem at all. If one believes traditional Christian tenets, then those who act virtuously, or on behalf of the good of all, are rewarded for their efforts with eternal bliss in heaven. Those who fail in these duties are punished with eternal torment in hell. Thus, it is clearly in each person’s self-interest to behave virtuously, for the good of an eternity in heaven (and avoiding an eternity in hell) will always outweigh whatever benefit acting selfishly and against the common good provides in this life. The utilitarian and the egoist thus must act identically.

Karl Marx was talking about French politics when he quipped that when history repeats itself the first time is tragedy and the second farce, so it was appropriate that this past Saturday’s French presidential election confirmed the theory. The Socialist candidate, François Hollande, came out ahead, earning a berth in the runoff with incumbent Gaullist Nicolas Sarkozy, which he is widely expected to win as well. But more startling were the third and fourth place challengers. Marine Le Pen, the neo-fascist candidate whose father Jean-Marie won a spot in the 2002 presidential runoff, earned 18 percent of the vote, only ten points behind Hollande, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a leftist backed by the French Communist Party who calls for a maximum income of $500,000, took in 11 percent.

Given the circumstances, one’s mind naturally turns to the last time Europe flirted seriously with far-left and far-right movements. And that, unsurprisingly to those of us who take an economically determinist view of political cycles, coincided with the last time that Europe had to deal with a financial meltdown and ensuing recession in the 1920s and 30s. Radical movements proliferated, with fascists gaining power in Germany and Italy and leftist and fascist governments ruling Spain in succession. Even the U.S. saw an uptick in interest in radicalism, with the quasi-fascist priest Charles Coughlin gaining widespread support.

Obviously, there is little risk of any of this repeating itself in the wake of the current crisis, not least because the continent’s current economic straits are markedly less dire than they were eighty years ago. But the parallels are real and illustrate a few ways in which politics hasn’t actually changed much in the intervening almost century.

There’s something strange about the fact that a radical document like Rep. Paul D. Ryan’s budget—a budget that would cut taxes, primarily for high earners, by $4.6 trillion while taking health insurance away from 14 million Medicaid beneficiaries—has been welcomed by centrist elements in Washington as a sensible, hard-headed contribution to the public debate over spending. Maya C. MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, declared that the budget “puts our nation on a fiscally sustainable path.” Robert L. Bixby, who runs the pro-deficit-reduction Concord Coalition, judged that the budget “fit the magnitude of the challenge.”

But then again, the budget was written in language that deficit hawks love. Ryan writes that, “At its core, this plan of action is about putting an end to empty promises from a bankrupt government.” The Ryans, MacGuineases, and Bixbys of the world say stuff like this all the time. We can’t afford the government we have. We’re going bankrupt. It’s unsustainable. And to this day, I have no idea what any of them are trying to say. That may sound like feigned incomprehension, but statements like theirs are truly vague, and none of the things they could mean make much sense.

Do the deficit hawks mean we’re going bankrupt now, or in the next decade? I certainly hope they don’t think either of those things, because that’s absurd. Take a look at interest rates for five- and 10-year Treasury bills. In both cases, the rates are negative. You should take two things away from this. The first is that if there were a significant risk that the US would default on its debts in the next five or 10 years, then, assuming at least a modicum of market rationality, those interest rates would be very, very high. For comparison, Greece, a country that actually is on the verge of default, has interest rates of above 20 percent on its 10-year bonds. When there’s a real risk a bond won’t be paid back, investors demand more interest to make it worthwhile. With Greece, investors are doing just that. With the U.S., they’re doing the opposite.

Everyone knows that libertarians don’t especially like it when the government, er, does stuff. But even the most doctrinaire libertarians generally accept that there are some functions that the state can justifiably perform. Apart from radical anarcho-capitalists like Murray N. Rothbard or David D. Friedman ’65, libertarians are generally comfortable with a state that enforces contracts between consenting parties, provides for the national defense, and, most importantly, stops individuals from violating each others’ rights. Robert Nozick, the late, great libertarian Harvard political philosopher, argued that only a minimal “night-watchman state” is justifiable. Among this state’s most important duties, he wrote in “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” was “protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, and fraud.”

No one would mistake Florida for a night-watchman state, but on Feb. 26, it failed to fulfill that basic duty that Nozick identified. One of its citizens, Trayvon Martin, was pursued and fatally shot by another private citizen, George Zimmerman, and, because the police agree with Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense, the killer was not arrested. As has been widely noted, this outcome likely has something to do with Florida’s extremely expansive “Stand Your Ground” law, under which one is allowed to use deadly force if they feel threatened even when they could have peacefully retreated instead.

There is some dispute over whether the Stand Your Ground statute, as written, actually renders Zimmerman criminally faultless. By many accounts, he was actually chasing Martin, and the law requires a “reasonable” fear on Zimmerman’s part of injury, but such concern appears, under the circumstances, to be paranoid rather than prudent. But in practice, laws like Stand Your Ground deter prosecutors from pursuing murderers like Zimmerman for fear that they can mount a successful case or that a trial judge will dismiss it before it even goes before a jury.

There once was a president who proposed a national government-run daycare program, a universal health care plan almost identical to the one eventually passed in 2010, and a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans. What’s more, he got all those measures—which, taken together, would have transformed the US into a bona fide, Western European-style social democracy—reasonably close to passage. He oversaw major Constitutional reform measures, including the lowering of the voting age to 18 and the passage by Congress of the Equal Rights Amendment, which banned discrimination on the basis of sex. He created the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupation Safety and Health Administration and signed the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act into law.

If you read enough articles like this one, you know that the president in question isn’t Franklin D. Roosevelt, class of 1904, or Lyndon B. Johnson, or anyone else you’d expect; that’d be too easy. No, it was Richard M. Nixon, enemy number one of the left for upwards of a decade and also the person who came closest to closing the gap between the American welfare state and those of all other developed nations. The fact that we cannot even imagine a conservative Republican advocating policies remotely similar today can tell us a lot about what has happened to U.S. politics since the 1970s. And the fact that Nixon failed in bringing the U.S. in line with its peer nations can tell us a lot about how hard it is to make real progress even when the fundamentals are on the side of change.

Today, it’s hard to imagine even a Democrat proposing some of Nixon’s agenda. A guaranteed minimum income would be laughed off the table, a silly proposal to give people an excuse to bum around and not work, rather than the devilishly effective anti-poverty measure it is. So what happened? Basically, the parties got more ideologically polarized, and the Republicans got much more conservative than the Democrats got liberal. As Jacob Hacker explained to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, since 1975 Senate Republicans went twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats went to the left, and House Republican went six times as far to the right as House Democrats went to the left. The end result was that the political center shifted significantly rightward.

As The Crimson reported on Friday, Harvard College is conducting a review of its abandonment of early admissions. While the admissions department is to be commended for thoughtfully evaluating its own policies, I wish it would conduct a more comprehensive review of Harvard’s admissions process. Indeed, I wish it would consider abandoning the admissions process altogether in favor of a randomized lottery.

The best way to do this would be in conjunction with other universities. Chad Adelman of the think tank Education Sector has proposed adopting the system used to match medical residents to hospitals. High school seniors would apply to a single admissions body and list their school preferences in order. Schools would set a minimum SAT score and high school GPA so that they do not admit students who truly cannot handle the work, but, otherwise, schools are randomly matched with students who list them as a preference.

Harvard probably has enough sway to launch such a system, but barring that it should set its own minimum threshold and then randomly cull from that vast majority of applicants who meet it. William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, Harvard’s long-time dean of admissions and financial aid, has said that 80 to 90 percent of Harvard applicants are qualified to be here. Harvard should identify that 80 to 90 percent, and then randomly accept 1600-1700 of them.

If you go to a Wal-Mart on the last night of the month, you’ll notice an odd scene. After 11 p.m., customers start to pour in, but they all check out after the clock strikes midnight. A similar phenomenon occurs at Kroger’s supermarkets and other 24-hour stores. The reason, as The Wall Street Journal’s Miguel Bustillo reported last week, is that electronic benefit accounts for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP, colloquially known as “food stamps”) refresh at midnight on the first of every month. Since the recession hit, this has led to increased midnight business, so much so that Wal-Mart has had to increase staffing at those hours to keep up and make an effort to keep shelves stocked for the period.

The people conducting the midnight runs are not just poor, but poor enough that even waiting until morning would leave them without needed food. "If you really think about it,” Bill S. Simon, President and CEO of Wal-Mart U.S., explained to Bustillo, “The only reason someone gets out there in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they have been waiting for it.” These are workers for whom even living paycheck-to-paycheck isn’t enough to keep food coming in regularly. And with food stamp rolls increasing from 26 million in 2007 to 41 million this year (and still growing), these midnight rushes are only going to become more popular in the foreseeable future.

One might look at this situation and see cause for increasing benefits for food stamp recipients. Not too long ago, Congress did just that. In April 2009, the stimulus package boosted every food stamp recipient’s benefits by 13 percent, or $80 a month for a family of four. The increase was supposed to last until 2014, but thanks to lower food prices, it looked likely that the increased benefits could extend into 2015 or even 2018. It was a win-win situation: Congress spent the same amount, and poor families benefited for another few years.

While mostly frustrating and depressing, the ongoing debate over how to handle the expiring Bush tax cuts has been educational in at least one way. I honestly did not realize how many people think someone earning $250,000 a year does not qualify as “rich.” The cutoff is important, as the Obama administration is proposing letting tax cuts on those above that income expire, but some in Congress are insisting that people who make more than about 98 percent of Americans aren’t wealthy. Jim A. Himes ’88, a congressman from Connecticut and, relevantly, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, said that $250,000 a year doesn’t make one “really rich.” Senate Minority Leader A. Mitch McConnell introduced a plan to extend all the Bush cuts—and increase the national debt by $4 trillion–by claiming Obama’s plan would target “the people who’ve been hit hardest by this recession” (a claim he later was forced to retract, excuse me, “clarify”).

Suffice it to say, if you’re making over $250,000 a year, you have not been hit harder than the millions of workers who’ve run out of unemployment benefits or the tens of thousands of families who have been forced into homeless shelters over the past two years. And if you’re making that much and still inclined to deny your place among the rich, stop. Just stop. Just 2.1 percent of households earn over $250,000 a year. They earned almost five times the income–$52,029–of the median household in 2008. As writer Daniel Gross says, “You’re rich. Get over it.”

That said, the delusion that $250,000-a-year earners aren’t rich has its causes. Most importantly, the happiness one gains from income comes not from its objective benefits so much as from where it places the income-earner in relation to his neighbors. This point, stressed most prominently by the economist Robert H. Frank, is called the “relative income effect” and has a large empirical literature backing it up, a literature that also suggests relative income affects happiness much more than absolute income. What’s more, the economist Michael T. McBride has found that the effect is stronger among high-income individuals. Put more simply, having money doesn’t make us happy. Having more money than our neighbors makes us happy. And having more money than our neighbors makes us especially happy if we have a lot of money, period.

Even in a media environment as frenetic as the one in which we currently reside, the speed with which technology news site Gizmodo somehow became a martyr is remarkable. On the morning of April 19, Jason Chen, Gizmodo’s editor, announced that the site had “found” a prototype of the next edition of the Apple iPhone and proceeded to post pictures, videos, and detailed technical specifications of the device. The site followed up that evening with an account of how Gizmodo “found” the device. In short, an Apple employee—whom Gizmodo outed, even posting a couple of his Facebook photos—brought it to a bar, where he left it by accident. Another bar patron proceeded to steal the device and sold it to Gizmodo for $5,000. The same day, Apple demanded the device returned, and Gizmodo agreed. That Friday, April 23, police obtained a search warrant for Chen’s residence and seized several computers, hard drives, and other electronics.

Given that Chen likely used at least some of these devices to arrange payment for the iPhone, they are certainly relevant to any investigation into both the initial theft and Chen’s purchase of the stolen goods—a crime punishable by a year’s jail time in California. But rather than accept that people who commit felonies tend to get search warrants exercised against them, activists and media outlets reacted to the search by leaping to Chen’s and Gizmodo’s defense. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a generally admirable civil libertarian group focused on protecting rights online, declared the search warrant illegal, agreeing with Gizmodo’s belief that California’s shield laws intended to protect journalists meant that police could not seize computers containing Chen’s notes and data. A representative of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called the search “an incredibly clear violation of state and federal law.” Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” even got in on the act, mocking the police for giving Chen the “meth lab in the basement treatment” and implicitly referring to Apple’s lawyers as “Appholes.” On both a legal and moral level, the reaction is bizarre.

The legal argument is the easiest to dispatch. California law does protect journalists from police seizure of notes and other relevant materials under most circumstances. But appeals courts have ruled that it does not protect journalists from searches intended to uncover evidence of criminal conduct. As this was the purpose of the search of Chen’s home, police are in the clear under state law. Nor does the federal Privacy Protection Act provide any relief to Gizmodo. The act specifically allows searches and seizures if “there is probable cause to believe that the person possessing such materials has committed or is committing the criminal offense to which the materials relate.” As Chen’s actions were criminal, this provision applies to his case. The act has not been tested in court, but a previous Supreme Court decision on the matter is clear. “Although stealing documents or private wiretapping could provide newsworthy information,” the Court ruled, “[n]either reporter nor source is immune from conviction for such conduct.”

No concept gets quite as much abuse in American politics as partisanship. Those in power love to blame it for stopping legislation from advancing. When Senator Jim Bunning shut down the Senate to prevent a bill extending unemployment benefits from going forward, the White House blasted the action as “blatant, partisan obstructionism.” The opposition in turn attacks as “partisan” the legislation it obstructs.  In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announcing their opposition to financial reform, members of the Senate Republican Caucus declared: “We are united in our opposition to the partisan legislation reported by the Senate Banking Committee.”

The use of “partisan” as an epithet is rooted in two impulses. The first is the common perception that the electorate finds partisanship unsavory; the second is that it prevents Congress from getting things done. As President Obama put it to a House Republican retreat in January, “I don’t think [the American people] want more gridlock. I don’t think they want more partisanship,” with the connection between the two left unexamined.

Neither of these ideas, however, holds up to much scrutiny. The voters certainly say they want politicians to be less partisan. Polls show that majorities of Americans think Republicans and Democrats in Congress—as well as the Obama administration—should make more of an effort to work across party lines. This is curious, given that voters’ behavior is just as partisan as that of their representatives in Congress. The popular idea that there is a large group of swing voters representing the true will of the country is, by most metrics, false. The number of independent voters who actually change their minds in elections hovers around and below 10 percent of the electorate, sneaking a little above that in 2008. The rest of the electorate is composed of Democrats, Republicans, and independents who behave exactly like Democrats and Republicans. Although I’m sure this small group genuinely wants more bipartisan cooperation, I’m less sure that actual partisans, and may-as-well-be partisans, actually feel the same way.

Now that health-care reform has passed—and financial reform is moving along—the Senate’s fight over cap-and-trade legislation is just around the corner. Yet obscured in the debate is the fact that the U.S. already has a law giving the Environmental Protection Agency the responsibility to regulate greenhouse emissions. It’s called the Clean Air Act, and it’s been around since 1963.

Under the current version of the act, which has been amended significantly since passage, the EPA is required to control “any air pollutant” emanating from a motor vehicle that contributes to “air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” Enforcing this is not optional; indeed, the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, given their contribution to climate change. To comply, the EPA has adopted regulations controlling car emissions that will require car companies’ fleets to average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. Additional regulations controlling emissions from power plants are expected shortly.

As one would expect, this approach has provoked its share of grievances. Senator Lisa Murkowski is attempting to pass a resolution that would strip the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gasses. The House and President Obama will likely sink the effort, but Murkowski has a kernel of a point. EPA regulation is a fairly unsubtle way of regulating emissions; it fails to put a price on emissions, for one, which a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade system would both do. All else being equal, a more complex and carefully crafted emissions control law would be preferable.

Like most left-of-center people, I strongly support the health care bill that passed the House Sunday afternoon. The concrete benefits are familiar, but always worth repeating. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, it would reduce the ranks of the uninsured by 32 million by 2019, ultimately ensuring that 95 percent of non-elderly legal residents of the U.S. will have coverage. In doing so, it will make a large dent in the 45,000 yearly deaths attributable to a lack of health insurance. It will ban clearly unjust practices, such as denying coverage based on a pre-existing illness or disability, and reduce premiums for many working class families.

Just as critically, this bill will finally establish the provision of basic health services as the responsibility of the federal government. Before this bill, America was a country where the government could disclaim responsibility when its citizens suffered and died early due to diseases beyond their control. Now, such cruel neglect is not an option.

There have been some fair criticisms of the bill from both sides. Liberal critics are right to condemn the bill’s restrictions on funding for insurance plans that cover abortion, which could function as an effective ban on the procedure for poor women. Conservatives and centrists are right to condemn the bill’s cost control measures, which do not go far enough in moving to a system where doctors are compensated for quality of outcomes, not quantity of procedures. These are both areas of reform that can, and should, be pursued in future revisions to the bill.

One has to wonder what made Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) so eager to introduce their new tax reform plan last week. The problem is not with the plan itself, which is fine policy-wise. It simplifies the personal income tax into three rates—15 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent—and eliminating most deductions while tripling the standard deduction, which has the potential to make the tax more progressive, as many deductions are only claimed by filers well-off enough to hire accountants or to have the spare time to file long returns themselves.

The problem is that this has been tried before. In 1986, Senator Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and Congressman Dick Gephardt (D-Mont.) wrote and President Reagan signed a similar proposal, which paid for a sharp cut in the top income tax bracket by radically reducing the number of deductions and tax incentives. While by no means perfect, it was a worthwhile measure that ended numerous special interest carve-outs in the tax code. Or rather, delayed them. Within a few years of passage, many of the same incentives returned due to aggressive corporate pressure, and eventually we arrived at our current code, which is complicated enough to spur simplification efforts like Wyden and Gregg’s. Do today’s reformers really expect a more permanent fate for their effort?

The reasons for the 1986 bill’s successful dismemberment are clear enough. While there is broad popular support for a simpler tax code, that support can only be mobilized every so often. Big efforts can gain momentum, but there cannot be major pushback every time a company wants a tax credit thrown its way. With those dynamics as much in place as they were in 1986, simplifying the tax code remains a Sisyphean enterprise unlikely to reap lasting rewards.

Two weeks ago, Newsweek put out a cute video entitled “The Decade in 7 Minutes,” condensing notable news events of the past 10 years into a seven-minute montage.

While most of the content is free of editorial comment, the program’s treatment of one event stands out. As the year 2007 begins, the narrator of the video intones, “The U.S. undertakes a surge of more troops in Iraq. Opponents say it won’t work. It does.”

To be sure, this statement summarizes the media consensus about the surge. “The surge, clearly, has worked, at least for now,” The New York Times’s Dexter Filkins pronounced in August 2008, in an ostensibly unbiased news article. That December, National Public Radio political correspondent Mara Liasson declared that, through the surge, President George W. Bush had “corrected his mistakes” in Iraq and that “he is handing over a war that’s pretty manageable, if not almost won, to his successor.” “The Decade in 7 Minutes” is not even Newsweek’s first time promoting the surge in a straight news item. An October article by Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas ’73 included opposition to the surge as a mark against Vice President Biden’s judgment, stating as fact that the policy “rescued the American effort from near defeat.”

Social-science superstars Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and Slate music critic Jonah Weiner all triggered firestorms in the past week by endorsing propositions most sensible people would find absurd. Levitt and Dubner’s sequel to “Freakonomics,” the ever-creatively titled “Superfreakonomics,” included a chapter on global warming urging complacency and riddled with inaccuracies, from its assertion that curbing carbon emissions cannot prevent catastrophic climate change (it can) to its argument that solar panels contribute to global warming because they are black and radiate heat (they don’t, and in fact most are blue). Weiner, meanwhile, argued that the late-’90s atrocity of a band—Creed—is underrated.

As one would expect, each piece of nonsense triggered a strong counter reaction. Environmental bloggers and advocacy groups jumped on Levitt and Dubner, picking apart each and every piece of misinformation that they are using their fame to spread. Criticism of Weiner was centered on Twitter, where users offered satirical “Slate pitches” with theses as ridiculous as the notion that Creed has any redeeming value, like “Suicide: Why it might not actually kill you” or “Bank of America: Too awesome to fail.”

But while Slate took its criticism in stride, joking that it might actually publish some of these suggested stories, Levitt and Dubner were deeply offended that someone would take them to task for their sloppiness. “I just don’t get it,” Levitt lamented, adding that he didn’t think that “any environmentalist who really cares about the Earth’s future” could attack the duo. Dubner dismissed the criticism as a “smear” and a “partisan attack.” The implication was clear: Only a person who cared nothing about the planet, or a complete hack, could possibly criticize Levitt and Dubner’s spunky, counterintuitive take.

Such is the state of counterintuitive journalism these days. It used to be that purposefully contrarian journals like The New Republic or Slate used this angle as a means of slyly critiquing received wisdom, with full awareness—as seen in Slate’s response to mockery of the Creed article—that opposing the conventional wisdom was no more a guarantee of truth than buying conventional wisdom itself. They accepted criticism of their methods in the way they hoped establishment institutions would, with Slate even using its 10th anniversary to give four of the magazine’s critics article space in which to air their grievances.

But as Levitt and Dubner’s response suggests, the burden of proof has shifted. If one echoes the conventional wisdom, one must be a pawn of the establishment. If one challenges it, one is a brave truth-teller. It is a convenient posture, allowing careless writers like the “Freakonomics” duo to publish straight-up falsehoods in mass-market books and plead persecution when called out. But it also permits contrarians to traffic in the same fallacies and factual errors of which they so often accuse more mainstream writers. Perhaps most alarmingly, it allows them to misidentify what “mainstream” views entirely.

This is the proximate root of the “Superfreakonomics” debacle. Levitt and Dubner wanted to write about global warming, but they wanted to do it in such a way that was original and impugned the status quo. From the book, it seems like the following characterizes the status quo: a corporate system that allows ever-escalating carbon emissions, as well as a government patently unwilling to expend the monetary and political capital needed to stop catastrophic climate change.

However, Levitt and Dubner decided that criticizing the real culprits would not be counterintuitive enough. So instead, they embraced a motley crew of technological cranks who dismiss proven technologies like solar power in favor of utopian, untested schemes like cooling the earth through simulated volcano eruptions. Thus, they ended up criticizing the dissidents trying to limit carbon emissions rather than the status quo that allows such emissions free rein.

This type of misidentification has led to disaster in the past. After September 11th, a similar contrarian impulse led liberals to use books like Paul Berman’s “Terror and Liberalism” and magazines like, yes, The New Republic to argue in favor of war with Iraq against a perceived “liberal establishment.” The end result: a sturdy liberal infrastructure backing the real establishment, namely the Bush administration, as it launched America into the greatest foreign-policy disaster since Vietnam. As with Levitt and Dubner, contrarianism was co-opted into vigorous support for the status quo.

Again, there is nothing wrong in principle with contrarianism that is accurately targeted and aware of its limitations. Indeed, it is often a helpful tool for challenging real orthodoxies. But, as Levitt and Dubner show, a self-serious, sloppy contrarianism only ends up entrenching the status quo it seeks to critique.

Dylan R. Matthews ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Kirkland House. His columns appear on alternate Tuesdays.

Social-science superstars Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and Slate music critic Jonah Weiner all triggered firestorms in the past week by endorsing propositions most sensible people would find absurd. Levitt and Dubner’s sequel to “Freakonomics,” the ever-creatively titled “Superfreakonomics,” included a chapter on global warming urging complacency and riddled with inaccuracies, from its assertion that curbing carbon emissions cannot prevent catastrophic climate change (it can) to its argument that solar panels contribute to global warming because they are black and radiate heat (they don’t, and in fact most are blue). Weiner, meanwhile, argued that the late-’90s atrocity of a band—Creed—is underrated.

As one would expect, each piece of nonsense triggered a strong counter reaction. Environmental bloggers and advocacy groups jumped on Levitt and Dubner, picking apart each and every piece of misinformation that they are using their fame to spread. Criticism of Weiner was centered on Twitter, where users offered satirical “Slate pitches” with theses as ridiculous as the notion that Creed has any redeeming value, like “Suicide: Why it might not actually kill you” or “Bank of America: Too awesome to fail.”

It is a shame that Libyan despot Muammar al-Qaddafi, while pontificating in front of the General Assembly this past week about how swine flu originated in a weapons lab, how the Kennedy assassination should be reinvestigated, and how Israel and Palestine should merge to become the nation of “Isratine,” also proposed reforming the United Nations Security Council—not because the concern was unwarranted, but exactly because it deserves attention. The fact that the world’s most powerful security body leaves billions under its purview without real representation is not just fodder for a madman’s ramblings. It is a true scandal, one that the body’s current members should feel an obligation to address.

Upon the UN’s founding, selection of the council’s five permanent members seemed straightforward. Ultimate control would rest with the nations that collectively won the war leading to the body’s creation—to wit, the U.S., U.K., France, the Chinese nationalists, and the Soviet Union. Historically speaking, this was to be expected. Traditionally, the victors of a conflict claim a key stake in any postwar order, a major spoil of victory. As a matter of justice, the legitimacy of this norm certainly warrants debate, but it at least made historical sense.

However, as the years wore on, it became increasingly clear that the council, now charged with preventing a breed of war different from World War II, would likewise face conflicts that involved a different set of nations. As the political scientist John Mueller believes, major war is obsolescent and nearing extinction regardless of the UN’s efforts. Instead, intrastate warfare dominates as of late. Since 1940, the number of ongoing civil wars has skyrocketed, not because more nations experience them, but because the conflicts’ average duration has increased markedly. Meanwhile, state-level security efforts focus less on preventing war and more on limiting the development of specific weapons, most notably nuclear and ballistic missile systems.