Merry Christmas from Little Nemo

And make sure to drive safely.

As American as Wyatt Earp

As I mentioned before, today's gun culture is radically different from the one I grew up with. On a related note, the gun rights movement, while often presented as conservative (pushing back against liberal advances) or reactionary (wanting to return to the standards of the past), is actually radical (advocating a move to a state that never existed). The idea that people have an absolute right to carry a weapon anywhere, at any time and in any fashion was never the norm, not even in the period that forms the basis for so much of the personal mythology of the gun rights movement.

UCLA professor of law, Adam Winkler

Guns were obviously widespread on the frontier. Out in the untamed wilderness, you needed a gun to be safe from bandits, natives, and wildlife. In the cities and towns of the West, however, the law often prohibited people from toting their guns around. A visitor arriving in Wichita, Kansas in 1873, the heart of the Wild West era, would have seen signs declaring, "Leave Your Revolvers At Police Headquarters, and Get a Check."

A check? That's right. When you entered a frontier town, you were legally required to leave your guns at the stables on the outskirts of town or drop them off with the sheriff, who would give you a token in exchange. You checked your guns then like you'd check your overcoat today at a Boston restaurant in winter. Visitors were welcome, but their guns were not.

In my new book, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, there's a photograph taken in Dodge City in 1879. Everything looks exactly as you'd imagine: wide, dusty road; clapboard and brick buildings; horse ties in front of the saloon. Yet right in the middle of the street is something you'd never expect. There's a huge wooden billboard announcing, "The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited."

While people were allowed to have guns at home for self-protection, frontier towns usually barred anyone but law enforcement from carrying guns in public.

When Dodge City residents organized their municipal government, do you know what the very first law they passed was? A gun control law. They declared that "any person or persons found carrying concealed weapons in the city of Dodge or violating the laws of the State shall be dealt with according to law." Many frontier towns, including Tombstone, Arizona--the site of the infamous "Shootout at the OK Corral"--also barred the carrying of guns openly.

Today in Tombstone, you don't even need a permit to carry around a firearm. Gun rights advocates are pushing lawmakers in state after state to do away with nearly all limits on the ability of people to have guns in public.

Like any law regulating things that are small and easy to conceal, the gun control of the Wild West wasn't always perfectly enforced. But statistics show that, next to drunk and disorderly conduct, the most common cause of arrest was illegally carrying a firearm. Sheriffs and marshals took gun control seriously.

These facts aren't contested. They aren't obscure. You can even find them in classic Westerns like Winchester '73.

In 1876, Lin McAdam (James Stewart) and friend 'High-Spade' Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell) pursue outlaw 'Dutch Henry' Brown (Stephen McNally) into Dodge City, Kansas. They arrive just in time to see a man forcing a saloon-hall girl named Lola (Shelley Winters) onto the stage leaving town. Once the man reveals himself to be Sheriff Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) Lin backs down. Earp informs the two men that firearms are not allowed in town and they must check them in with Earp's brother Virgil.

In other words, even people who learned their history from old movies should know there's something extreme going on.

Traditional vs. current gun culture

Both Joseph and I come from parts of the world (Northern Ontario and the lower Ozarks, respectively) where guns played a large part in the culture. Hunting and fishing was big. This was mainly for sport, though there were families that significantly supplemented their diet with game and most of the rest of us had family members who remembered living off the land.

We also have a different take on guns for defense. When a call to the police won't bring help within forty-five minutes (often more than that where Joseph grew up), a shotgun under the bed starts sounding much more sensible.

Guns have never been a big part of my life, but I'm comfortable with them. I know what it's like to use a rifle, a shotgun and a revolver. I don't get any special emotional thrill from firing a gun but I do appreciate the satisfaction of knocking a can off of a post.

I think this perspective is important in the debate for a couple of reasons: first, because many discussions on the left often get conflated with impressions and prejudices about rural America and the South and second, (and I think this is the bigger issue) because these traditional ideas are becoming increasingly marginalized in the gun rights movement.

Gun culture has changed radically since the Eighties, as this TPM reader explains

Most of the men and children (of both sexes) I met were interested in hunting, too. Almost exclusively, they used traditional hunting rifles: bolt-actions, mostly, but also a smattering of pump-action, lever-action, and (thanks primarily to Browning) semi-automatic hunting rifles. They talked about gun ownership primarily as a function of hunting; the idea of “self-defense,” while always an operative concern, never seemed to be of paramount importance. It was a factor in gun ownership - and for some sizeable minority of gun owners, it was of outsized (or of decisive) importance - but it wasn’t the factor. The folks I interacted with as a pre-adolescent and - less so - as a teen owned guns because their fathers had owned guns before them; because they’d grown up hunting and shooting; and because - for most of them - it was an experience (and a connection) that they wanted to pass on to their sons and daughters.

And that’s my point: I can’t remember seeing a semi-automatic weapon of any kind at a shooting range until the mid-1980’s. Even through the early-1990’s, I don’t remember the idea of “personal defense” being a decisive factor in gun ownership. The reverse is true today: I have college-educated friends - all of whom, interestingly, came to guns in their adult lives - for whom gun ownership is unquestionably (and irreducibly) an issue of personal defense. For whom the semi-automatic rifle or pistol - with its matte-black finish, laser site, flashlight mount, and other “tactical” accoutrements - effectively circumscribe what’s meant by the word “gun.” At least one of these friends has what some folks - e.g., my fiancee, along with most of my non-gun-owning friends - might regard as an obsessive fixation on guns; a kind of paraphilia that (in its appetite for all things tactical) seems not a little bit creepy. Not “creepy” in the sense that he’s a ticking time bomb; “creepy” in the sense of…alternate reality. Let’s call it “tactical reality.”

The “tactical” turn is what I want to flag here. It has what I take to be a very specific use-case, but it’s used - liberally - by gun owners outside of the military, outside of law enforcement, outside (if you’ll indulge me) of any conceivable reality-based community: these folks talk in terms of “tactical” weapons, “tactical” scenarios, “tactical applications,” and so on. It’s the lingua franca of gun shops, gun ranges, gun forums, and gun-oriented Youtube videos. (My god, you should see what’s out there on You Tube!) Which begs my question: in precisely which “tactical” scenarios do all of these lunatics imagine that they’re going to use their matte-black, suppressor-fitted, flashlight-ready tactical weapons? They tend to speak of the “tactical” as if it were a fait accompli; as a kind of apodeictic fact: as something that everyone - their customers, interlocutors, fellow forum members, or YouTube viewers - experiences on a regular basis, in everyday life. They tend to speak of the tactical as reality.

There's one distinction I want to add here. There are reasonable scenarios where a pump action shotgun or a reliable revolver might get a rural homeowner, a clerk at a convenience store or a business traveler who can't always avoid risky itineraries out of trouble.

But when we talk about "tactical" weapons, we're no longer talking reasonable scenarios for civilians. Regular people don't need thirty round magazines and laser sights to defend themselves. They need these things to live out fantasies, scenes they saw in movies. We're talking about different guns with an entirely different culture.

The end was near a long time ago

While working on an upcoming post, I came across this quote from a 1989 NYT profile of Fred Silverman:

He said going back to a network does not interest him. He added that he would tell any executive who took a network job to ''take a lot of chances and really go for it.''

''This is not a point in time to be conservative,'' he said. ''The only way to stop the erosion in network television is to come up with shows that are very popular.''

Given all we hear about how fast things are changing and those who don't embrace the future are doomed, it's healthy to step back and remind ourselves that, while there is certainly some truth to these claims, change often takes longer that people expect.

Experts started predicting the death of the big three networks about forty years ago when VCRs and satellites starting changing the landscape. That means that people have been predicting the imminent demise of the networks for more than half the time TV networks have been around.

At some point, technology will kill off ABC, CBS or NBC, but they've already outlasted many predictions and a lot of investors who lost truckloads of money over the past forty years chasing the next big thing would have been better off sticking with a dying technology.

Ddulites make lousy investors.

Medical Education

This letter by Adam Smith is very interesting.  The key excerpt:

What the physicians of Edinburgh at present feel as a hardship is, perhaps, the real cause of their acknowledged superiority over the greater part of other physicians. The Royal College of Physicians there, you say, are obliged by their charter to grant a licence, without examination, to all the graduates of Scotch universities. You are all obliged, I suppose, in consequence of this, to consult sometimes with very unworthy brethren. You are all made to feel that you must rest no part of your dignity upon your degree, distinction which you share with the men in the world, perhaps, whom you despise the most, but that you must found the whole of it upon your merit. Not being able to derive much consequence from the character of Doctor, you are obliged, perhaps, to attend more to your characters as men, as gentlemen, and as men of letters. The unworthiness of some of your brethren, may, perhaps, in this manner be in part the cause of the very eminent and superior worth of many of the rest. The very abuse which you complain of may in this manner, perhaps, be the real source of your present excellence. You are at present well, wonderfully well, and when you are so, be assured there is always some danger in attempting to he better.
 

It is a rather strong attack on medical licensing and the monopoly priviledges that it creates for both the schools that confer it and the people who are licensed.  The idea of a parallel apprenticeship system is intriguing, if complicated to figure out how to make work.  But the argument about the perverse incentives created by this system are of interest even today. 

A difference in kind

Megan McArdle has a story about pensions today that is too clever by half.  The only problem, is that there is a complete dis-analogy between a firm and a government:

Such a pension fund would, of course, be illegal. And for good reason: we recognize that it is not, in fact, a pension fund. It’s a promise by the corporation to pay its workers at some later date, not a funded pension plan. The company can call this anything they want—trust fund, pension plan, Ponzi scheme—but whatever we call it, we’d recognize it for what it is: a meaningless accounting fiction that does not in anyway enhance the security of worker retirements. And if, say, Verizon tried to fund its pension plan this way, liberals would hit the roof. Because we recognize that a pension fund full of third-party securities is not, in fact, very much like a pension fund full of securities issued by the same entity—corporate or government—that owes you the pension. 
 

It is true that the Federal government can choose to stop paying Social Security at any time.  And it is also true that money is fungible.  But the main point of differences is that the Federal government has the right to tax the citizens of the United States (and armed forces to back this right up).  No company has access to such a long term asset. 

This has not stopped governments from defaulting in the past and it sure won't stop them in the future.  But this is the same entity that regulates contracts between you and your self funded pension fund.  Why doesn't a financial asset manager decide to cash in all of their clients assets and head off into the sunset?  Well, because it is illegal.  But if there is no government then there is no reason to give back these huge pools of cash.

So, yes, it is possible that the government will turn on you but they have a) a massive, long term asset and b) not much else in the financial markets is likely to survive if they cease to function. 

Weekend puzzle -- Count the Squares

I really like this one. The solution is easy and requires only basic math and good pattern recognition. If you don't spot the pattern, however, you've got a slog ahead of you.

There are hundreds of squares in this picture with dimensions ranging from 1x1 to 12x12. Exactly how many squares are there?

I've got a more detailed pedagogical discussion of the problem at You Do the Math. I'll post the answer in the comments section of this post later in the week.

Why are there no "Right to Ranch" states?

Here's another installment in the right-to-free-ride discussion. Sometimes it's useful to consider hypothetical extreme cases when discussing a proposed law. Imagine that we took non-right-to-free-ride states and added the following conditions:

If you refuse to make payments to the union representing you, you will NOT be allowed to:

1. go and work for a non-union shop;

2. move to a right-to-free-ride state;

3. go into business for yourself.

You will, in other words, not be allowed to ply your trade under any circumstances unless you pay these fees. What would the Republican position be on these policies? How might conservative justices like Scalia and Thomas rule on the laws?

I turns out that you don't need to speculate because this isn't a hypothetical. If you're an American beef producer, you pay a fee to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association for every head of cattle you sell. You are required to fund lobbying and advertising campaigns ("Beef, it's what's for dinner"). What's more, the Supreme Court upheld the fee in an opinion authored by Justice Scalia.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, this was never about workers' rights. It was and is about one party using legislation to remove funding from the other party. Talking about it in any other terms is an insult to our intelligence.

And frankly, my intelligence is getting damned pissed off.

Right-to-free-ride state

Since we seem to be in the middle of a right-to-work thread, we should really take a moment to note an important point by Kahlenberg and Marvit in the New Republic:

"Nevertheless, there is an important lesson for liberals and labor in the Michigan story about the power of rhetoric. "Right to work" is a mendacious slogan but a politically resonant one. It's mendacious because everyone in every state has the right to work; the legislation simply gives employees the right to be free riders--to benefit from collective bargaining without paying for it. Yet members of the media mostly employ the phrase without qualification. (Even those that say "so-called" right to work repeat the phrase over and over again.) This past Saturday, the Washington Post'sfront page featured stories on gay marriage going before the U.S. Supreme Court and the right to work debate in Michigan--and a casual reader could assume that both stories were about "rights" ascendant."

What's wrong with science fiction authors?

They seem to have a strong opinions about people asking for free samples!

In truth, though, carefully edited text is a lot nicer to read and developing text to this level isn't free.

Right to work

I have to admit that I am with Jon Chait here:

Why is it fair to make workers in union workplaces pay an agency fee even if they don’t want to join the union? If you step back and think about it, the focus on this as a matter of personal liberty is kind of silly. On almost every single point of possible discontent you may have with a job — you don’t like the pay, you don’t like the hours, you don’t like your boss, you don’t like wearing a hairnet, you don’t like having ESPN blocked on your work computer even when there’s no work for you to do — the recourse is go work somewhere else. That recourse is also available for people who don’t want to pay an agency fee.

On top of that, there’s an additional recourse available for union-hating workers that isn’t available for most things. If a majority of workers don’t want to be represented by a union, they can vote to decertify the union.

Notice that we have almost no interest on attacking other aspects of employment that reduce freedom for the workers involved.  If unions made life worse for workers they would, on average, wither way if there were enough employment alternatives.  So if you think Unions are uniformly bad then maybe fighting for full employment would be a better choice?  Then everyone could vote (with their feet) for the jobs that they found the most satisfying.  

But curiously the right to work folks don't seem to be agitating for increased government spending to make full employment a reality.  Nor do they seem to be principled anti-deficit folks fighting for more workplace regulation in other arenas.  It's all rather confusing.

New at You Do the Math -- The Eugen Weber Paradox

This is not Harvey Korman...

...which is at least tangentially related to this post about Udacity, educational media, ddulites and my skepticism about the coming revolution.

"Rove's Dilemma" Graph Game

I suspect that Karl Rove's strategy in 2000 was to use the support of evangelicals and nativists to entrench Republican power then abandon them and transition to other groups, particularly Hispanics. Rove, an agnostic who was close to his gay adoptive father, appears to have had no personal investment in the social conservative wing of the party and though overrated as a strategist, he was certainly capable of following demographic trends.

Twelve years later, that strategy is looking less than doable. The nativists and social conservatives appear to be a shrinking demographic and the idea of winning over Hispanic voters seems increasingly unlikely. Some have made the case that the GOP's best strategy at this point is abandon its shrinking base and make a big play for the next demographic wave. The trouble with that strategy (from a strictly strategic viewpoint) is that a party has to maintain a certain critical mass to remain viable.

All this got me thinking about the best way to describe this. Here's what I've come up with. It's not there yet but I think it's on the right track.

1. We have a graph where each node is associated with a shifting size metric.

2. These nodes represent populations. You win support from these populations with messages.

3. If you target two nodes with the same message those nodes are associated

4. If the message targeted to one nodes raises support in that node and lowers it in another, those two nodes are disassociated

5. You can not target disassociated nodes.

6. Messages have a half life. If you wish to drop a node so you can start targeting one disassociated with it, you will have to wait a few cycles.

7. The objective is to get the most support possible support over the run of the game while never letting that support fall below a critical level.

Other than a little with Bayesian networks (which doesn't quite seem to cover this) I've never done a graph-based simulation so the odds are good that I'm stating or missing the obvious here. Still, the idea of graph as shifting fitness landscape might be interesting and it does explain how GOP strategists could have seen the coming demographic tides and could still have found themselves trapped by the rising water.

...worth a thousand words

A graph that really makes its point.


From James Lawrence Powell via Tim Haab by way of Thoma

This is simply remarkable

Aaron Carroll:

Lots of those 65 and 66-year-olds will need Medicaid. That will cost the federal government about $8.9 billion. Lots of those seniors will go to the exchanges for insurance. That will cost the federal government about $9.4 billion in subsidies. Oh, that Medicaid will cost states too, about $700 million. The 65 and 66 year olds getting  insurance from their employers will cost them about $4.5 billion (they’re expensive). As I’ve reported before, Medicare premiums will go up ($1.8 billion), and exchange premiums will go up ($700 million). And, there will be increased out-of-pocket spending by the 65 and 66-year-olds themselves for premiums, deductibles, co-pays, etc. Add it all up. To save the federal government $24.1 billion, we need to spend $29.8 billion.
 

 Even if some of these assumptions are naive, it doesn't look like this change is about saving money at all.  Instead, I am beginning to accept Peter Sunderman's claim that it is all about the long game of decreasing the consituency for the program.  But as a practical matter, it seems like this is a fairly stiff price to pay for a symbolic gesture that will make things more dificult for people to get medical care.  I am not even convinced that it does much to increase the work incentive -- moving social security to age 67 likely did most of the heavy lifting on this front already.