What Ever Happened To Mortgages?

"11.1 million, or 23.1 percent, of all residential properties with a mortgage were in negative equity at the end of the fourth quarter of 2010, up from 10.8 million, or 22.5 percent, in the third quarter. The small increase reflects the price declines that occurred during the fourth quarter and led to lower values. An additional 2.4 million borrowers had less than five percent equity, referred to as near-negative equity, in the fourth quarter. Together, negative equity and near-negative equity mortgages accounted for 27.9 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage nationwide. . . .

The consensus is that home prices will fall another 5 percent to 10 percent in 2011. If so, the most that negative equity will rise is another 10 percentage points, all else equal. . . .

The aggregate level of negative equity increased to $751 billion in Q4, up from $744 billion last quarter but still below $800 billion a year ago. Over $450 billion of the aggregate negative equity dollars include borrowers who are upside down by more than 50 percent." . . . About 10% of homeowners with mortgages have more than 25% negative equity. . . . Just under $200 billion more is for borrowers who have 25% to 50% negative equity. . . .

In Nevada, over 65% of homeowners with mortgages owe more than their homes are worth [and another 5% have less than 5% equity]. Arizona and Florida are around 50%. Michigan, Georgia and California are all over 30%.

From here.

The total number of mortgages that are upside down or near upside down (which in practice means that sale costs would leave the seller upside down) is 13.5 million. In February, there were 13.7 million people unemployed (an unemployment rate of 8.9%). While there is no doubt significant overlap between the two groups, many of the unemployed don't have mortgages, rent, or aren't upside down in their mortgages, so the combined misery numbers are great. There are far more people in the United States who are upside down on their mortgages, in default on their consumer loans, and/or unemployed than there are who are members of unions (although the two groups, of course, are not mutually exclusive).

In Colorado, about 20% of homeowners with mortgage owe more than their homes are worth, and another 5% have less than 5% equity. Nationally, about half of homeowners have mortgages.

Nationally, about 13% of all mortgages are in default, including about 4.5% that are in the foreclosure process. The 2010 peak was 14.5%. Before the housing bust, 5.5% was typical and about 1% of mortgages were in the foreclosure process at any one time.

While 8.5% of all mortgages are in default (excluding foreclosures which are another 4.5%), the rates vary by loan type. For subprime loans the default rate is about 30% (another 14% are in foreclosure). For option ARMs it is about 20% (another 18% are in foreclosure). For Alt-A is it about 14% (another 8% are in foreclosure). For FHA/VA/etc. loans it is about 10%. For non-agency jumbo prime mortgages it is about 5% (another 2% are in foreclosure). For agency prime mortgages it is about 3% (another 1% are in foreclosure).

Non-agency jumbo prime mortgages are defaulting at the rate the all mortgages combined did six years ago.

About 30% of all real estate sales are either short sales or sales of foreclosed properties.

Three years of recession have trimmed $1.4 billion of consumer debt off the nation's balance sheets, bringing the total to $11.4 billion, but much of that has come from writeoffs rather than payoffs.

About 74% of all consumer debt is purchase money mortgage debt, 6% is home equity revolving credit lines, 6% is car loan debt, and 5% is student loan debt. Credit card debt comprises 6% of consumer debt, and 3% of consumer debt is of some other type. Thus, the vast majority (91%) of consumer debt is either secured by collateral or not dischargable in bankruptcy, and two-thirds of the rest is held by credit card companies. About 10% of all consumer debt is currently in default, more than double the norm in a boom economy.

Sometimes foreclosure sales do cover more than is owed on the loan, but the people losing their homes often only find out about their windfall much later: "In a search of just three Front Range counties — Denver, Arapahoe and Adams — The Denver Post found that dozens of former homeowners were owed more than $653,300 since 2008." The biggest surpluses approach $50,000, and many are in the $10,000 to $30,000 range. Little affirmative effort is taken to find those entitled to the funds (often letters are mailed to the foreclosed upon house!).

A settlement has been reached with five big banks in the Robo-Signing foreclosure process scandal:

The lenders could be fined under the final agreement or forced to write down the value of their loans to borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. The banks are Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and GMAC. Together, they have 59 percent of all U.S. home mortgages, according to Miller.

Also under the draft terms, a lender's denial of a mortgage modification reportedly would trigger a review by an independent individual or panel.

Analysis

The fact that five banks have 59% of all U.S. home mortgages is itself remarkable. Their bad decisions (and bad decisions by lenders whose loans they purchased, often at a discount), are coming to roost, and in much of the nation a huge share of all families are under pressure as a result.

How do you even begin to have an economy on a basis that makes sense when 70% of homeowners with mortgages are upside down or have less than 5% equity, and your state has recourse loans, as Nevada does? I'd be willing to guess that Nevada also has a below average rate of free and clear homeownership, and that Nevada has a disproportionate share of loans that are more than 25% upside down which make up the lion's share of bank losses.

Why save money when you could be foreclosed upon at any time and have your savings seized for a deficiency judgment? Why pay your credit cards when you are in default on your mortgage, will lose you home in short order, and you will be subprime and unable to obtain new credit for the next seven years no matter what you do? The credit card company has no realistic possibilty of collecting out of your non-existent home equity, or your non-existent savings, and will have to compete with a huge deficiency judgment if you file for bankruptcy diluting their claim against any assets that you may have. They can hope to be first in line to garnish your wages for a while, but that is about it.

If the bankruptcy code provided for a cramdown for residential real estate, the creditable threat of it might lead to a mass produced mortgage modification wave with the consent of lenders in distressed real estate markets like these. But, it doesn't, thanks in part to the recalcitrance of people like Colorado Senator Bennet. So, tens of millions of people with upside down homes will soldier on with no incentive to make money. No amount of tax cuts can create an incentive to encourage people to maximize their productive earnings if creditors are in a position to immediately take all the tax savings away.

The priority that the tax code gives to child support and maintenance also creates a strong economic incentive for couples to divorce and shield some income from creditors (and squeeze out other garnishments of wages). Add to that the pressures that economic strife already places on families, and the situation becomes corrosive to families (althought this may be a ticking time bomb, right now, people can't afford to move out and form new households or hire divorce lawyers, so divorces are temporarily down).

There is really very little chance that the real estate in Nevada or California or Arizona or Florida will recover to their previously price levels any time soon either. Real estate in all of those states was grossly inflated by a price bubble that was deeply out of touch with any reality based measures.

If banks actively seek to enforce deficiency judgments against Nevada home owners, it isn't unthinkable that a third of more of all Nevadans could go bankrupt. A handful of banks are the beneficial owners of the lion's share of the real estate in Las Vegas and Reno.

WMDs As An Invalid Concept

The usual case against the Iraq War is that we initiated the war to remove "Weapons Of Mass Destruction" (WMDs) that post-war intelligence did not reveal, although Donald Rumsfield, Dick Cheney and a few others central to starting the war are convinced that the post-war search was just botched. (There was never any connection between 9-11 and Iraq either.)

Neuroskeptic takes a different tack on the issue. The concept of Weapons of Mass destruction is overinclusive, he argues. Nuclear bombs are without a doubt highly destructive. But, no one claimed that Iraq had or was about to obtain those. Yet, there is no good evidence that chemical weapons (which is what the Iraqis were allegedly developing and had used in the past), or biological weapons, are actually particularly worse than plain old bullets and conventional explosives delivered en masse, which have been equally deadly or worse than any past example of chemical or biological weapon useage. He does not even include the most extreme examples of killings with conventional weapons such as Dresden or World War I trench warfare. He acknowledges the theoretical mass destruction risk posed by biological weapons, which could cause a global plague, but Iraq wasn't alleged to have been developing those either.

Neuroskeptic's analysis is notable, because it denies that there was good cause to start the Iraq War even if everything that intelligence sources had alleged was true. As he points out, chemical weapons, even if Iraq had them, wouldn't be any different in the magnitude of the destruction that had the capacity to cause than their ample conventional weapon capacities.

Iraq and Afghanistan considered

The lack of a proper cause to go to war in Iraq, in turn, matters, because Iraq has not demonstrably been left better off than it was under Saddam Hussein.

Certainly, Hussein wasn't a nice guy. He was your run of the mill totalitarian Middle Eastern dictator. But, Iraq had a more developed and economically productive middle class than most of its neighbors; a large share of that middle class went into exile as a result of the war and the nation's infrastructure has still not recovered. The strict totalitarian rule of the regime made possible interethnic toleration that dissolved into ethnic cleansing after the invasion - ethnically mixed neighborhoods and regions have vanished in favor of strict ethnic segregation, the few ethnically mixed areas that remain are constantly at the brink of ethnic violence, and Iraqi Christians have pretty much been run out of the country.

Saddam Hussein was no worse that dicators like Egypt's Mubarak whom we supported heavily until shortly before his fall, and many other dictators and absolute monarchs whom we have supported around the world. Indeed, not so long before the Gulf War we did support Saddam Hussein as a bulwark against Iran and a guarantor of the flow of oil.

Iraq does have a civilian parliamentary government, made possible, in part, by reassurances of foreign military intervention on its behalf, but it is deeply disfunctional, particularly at the national level. It isn't entirely clear that there is a strong sentiment for continuing to operate as a single country. But for international disapproval, the Kurds would have left long ago, and the Shiite Southeast has secessionist leanings. Basic public safety is illusive, as suicide bombers in Iraq are happy to remind us. Is the average Iraqi better off? And, if not, did the war accomplishing anything worthwhile?

It also remains unclear what purpose was served by resurrecting Kuwait, a slave holding absolute monarchy with a tiny number of people keeping massive oil resources to themselves for the purpose of enhancing their standard of living to the detriment of their much more populous Iraqi neighbor, in the first Gulf War, after it had already been conquered by Iraq.

The no fly zone imposed to protect autonomous Kurdish region between the two Iraq Wars from human rights abuses instigated by their own totalitarian dictator is perhaps the only U.S. involvement in that time period that was really justified.

The Gulf War and Iraq War did demonstrate overwhelming Western military superiority over this Third World dicatorship. Indeed, they provoke a revolution in U.S. military strategy, tactics and weapons. But, one normally doesn't consider conducting realistic training exercises to be a sufficient justification for causing hundreds of thousands of people to die in war.

Afghanistan, was at least verifiably the base of the terrorists who caused 9-11, had arguably the most awful domestic government in the world under the Taliban, and, as I've noted before, was so profoundly squalid when we found it that it would be hard for anything we could do to make it worse. They had neither a semi-functional government nor any infrastructure of note to ruin, they were already in the midst of a bloody civil war that we muted for a number of years, the U.S. commitment has been an order of magnitude less than it was in Iraq, and the Afghani middle class went into exile more than two decades before we became involved. Indeed, given U.S. involvement in the resistance to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, we were arguably partially responsible for the dismal state of affairs there and had some moral obligation to fix it. While the Afghan government is corrupt and insecure, it was created with more democratic involvement from the Afghans, is less vexed with deadlock, and is a more clear improvement relative to the Taliban or loose alliance of warlords that controlled respective territories in the country prior to U.S. intervention.

Moreover, the U.S. objective in Afghanistan to retaliate for 9-11 was accomplished, and the goal of making it unavailable as a terrorist base from which the U.S. can be attacked isn't a terribly ambitious one and doesn't require Afghanistan to become an example for the rest of the world to emulate. The extrajudicial abductions and torture tactics used in the Afghan War and War on Terror, however, may have done more harm than good to U.S. interests, inciting more to join the terrorist cause.

Our near simultaneous removal of Iran's two greatest external military threats may not have been in U.S. interests either, and there is a very plausible case that Iran really is or was trying to develop a true weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear bomb.

The one X factor that might arguably justify the Iraq War is the extent to which it has provided a proof of concept model for an Isalmic Arab democracy without resorting to theocracy, and by example, made the revolutions in Tunisia and elsewhere possible. But, given the sorry example that it did provide, it is hard to give this justification, post hoc, of course, much credence. What did Iraq's democracy show that the Kurdish and Afghan examples did not? If anything, it illustrated the limits of democratic government as a solution.

Did Unions Create The Middle Class?

Many people . . . believe there would be no middle class in America if unions did not organize a third of the workforce after World War II. That post-war era, the sixties, still represents one of the most prosperous eras in the nation's history. But that lesson has been lost on most people who oppose unions.

From here.

Krugman agrees.

I don't oppose unions. But, I am also deeply skeptical of the claim by union supporters, and of liberal economists like Krugman, that they were as important an ingredient in creating the American middle class as claimed.

The Comparative View

Consider, for example, Japan and Western Europe. Both societies are far more economically egalitarian than the United States. They pay their executives less, and have a far more even distribution of wealth. But, they do it in two radically different ways.

Japan's big businesses are formally unionized, but their unions are company sponsored affairs that are actually forbidden by law in the United States on the grounds that they would be too management controlled. Japan also has a fairly small public sector, a very paternalistic government, a fairly weak public sector welfare state, and role for married women that is anything but equal even though unmarried women have substantial economic equality with their married peers.

Western Europe is heavily unionized (compared to the United States) with unions that are much more vigorous in asserting their rights than American unions, and those nations also uniformly have a much more comprehensive public sector social welfare state than either the United States or Japan. Germany gives workers at public corporations seats on the Board of Directors of their companies. France tolerates the kidnapping of executives in the course of union-management negotiations and gives public sector workers a frequently exercised right to strike. Sweden has very high taxes that finance a public sector welfare state that makes marriage an economically unnecessary part of being a parent.

The United States has a union movement that was almost as powerful as that of Europe through the 1960s, but that has declined in the four decades since then. It has a public sector welfare state, but it is anemic. We work more hours per year than workers in any other country in the world, and have the most unequal distribution of wealth in the developed world, together with low taxes by developed world standards overall, as measured by tax revenues collected relative to GDP. We have arguably the weakest private sector union movement in the developed world, but have a large, but timid public sector union movement.

The Weak Chain of Cause and Effect

The weakening of private sector unions has not had some of the results that you would expect. Workplace safety is profoundly improved from the standards that prevailed four decades ago when unions were much stronger. The workers whose wages have stagnated have been in industries where unions were strong, not in industries where unions have never had much of a foothold, although, in those industries, union workers tend to be paid more than non-union workers. Disgruntled workers in an American workplace are more likely to call a trial lawyer than a union organizer. American workers have less job security than their peers in either Japan or Europe, although in Japan this is mostly due to a private sector understanding of fairness, while in Europe it is mandated by law.

Income inequality in the United States has risen more or less steadily since 1947. Changing rates of unionization have done very little to alter the trend line, which has arguably flattened a little for families in the bottom 95% of the income distribution in the last decade. Earned income inequality is risen in Europe as well, but has been mitigated by their tax codes and social welfare state, rather than fundamental differences in the structure of economic relationships between people within businesses.

Public sector workers in the United States got job security and good benefits first, and unionized second, many decades after the prevailing accommodation on the shape of public sector employment terms, conditions and compensation were well established.

Did Ethnic Diversity Play A Role?

Some people would argue that American tolerance for inequality has roots in a lack of shared ethnic identity found in both Europe and Japan. I can't rule that out. There is circumstantial evidence that heavy immigration in the late twentieth century has frayed the European consensus on the social safety net and management-labor relations.

Then again, the union movement in the United States has historically been strongest in places where massive immigration has been attracted by job creation, not economically stable places, or places with homogeneous populations. The only place in the agriculture sector that there has ever been any meaningful effort at unionization, for example, has been among immigrant farm laborers. To my knowledge, there are not now, and never have been any unionized plantations. Rural America has produced a great many co-operatives but very few unions.

The deepest economic inequalities in the United States are not in the South where there is the greatest ideological and historical tolerance of inequality in the form of slavery and then, in post-slavery racism, and where opposition to unions has historically been strongest. The plutocrats who have captured such an immense share of the national wealth tend to be based in places like San Francisco and New York City where the financial sectors are strongest, despite the high and progressive taxes that they face there and the strongly liberal local politics. The strongly anti-union Deep South is the home not just of pervasive black rural poverty, but of pervasive white rural poverty.

Southern anti-unionism at the grassroots level may be a product of discontent, in the context of Southern efforts to a great extent successful, to create the "New Rust Belt" in the American South, with existing union efforts to keep new manufacturing investment in the "Old Rust Belt" where their members held jobs in manufacturing companies. From their perspective, Northern manufacturing unions most important position was their opposition to relocating jobs to the South where they lived, rather than any deep felt concern about what it was like to work in a union shop, something few Southerners have experienced.

The current hotbed of union busting sentiment, Midwest states like Wisconsin and Ohio, have historically been relatively homogeneous and inclined to have politics that focused on the collective good. Wisconsin was the epicenter of Garrison Keillor's somewhat idealized middle class heartland where petty village quibbles and small town values prevailed over deep ethnic strife. Where Swedish Lutherans and German Lutherans considered their unions to be mixed marriages. Ohio was one of the first states to proudly embrace a land grant funded system of public education.

Working Class v. Middle Class

Another part of the conundrum of identifying the union movement with the middle class, is that until the relatively recent rise of public sector unionization, unions have been largely the province of the blue collar working class (aka lower middle class). The history of the American union movement is full a smudge faced miners, rank and file factory workers, postal workers trudging through rain, sleet and snow, firemen stinking of smoke, truck drivers and skilled tradesmen.

Today's union movement is more middle class than it used to be because the working class jobs that used to be its core constituency are gone or no longer unionized, while the relatively few middle class unionized jobs have survived and grown relatively more important to the movement as a whole.

The minimum wage and hour laws that unions worked to enact were all but irrelevant to middle class workers who were paid salaries and often exempted from their application. The workplace safety protections and worker's compensation regimes that unions pushed to enact didn't mean much to people who sat behind desks and cash registers all day. The fact that employers started to offer health insurance was as much a product of World War II era wage controls as it was a product of a healthy union movement and benefited non-union workers in factory offices as much as it did union workers on the factory floor.

The entire social class that was at the heart of the union movement has contracted, and the middle class that it now claims used to identify itself with management. Bank tellers have a great deal in common with factory floor workers. They aren't paid much. They are micromanaged. They are rank and file employees of large enterprises that thrive on coordinated mass production. But, factory workers who identified as working class unionized, while bank tellers who identified as middle class, didn't.

A college education and a union card used to be considered contradictions in terms; alternative directions in life. Union leadership is how smart young working class men who couldn't dream of securing a college education or the management jobs that came with it found a way to exercise power in the large institutions where they worked, just as they did as non-commissioned officers did in the military. Yet, a college education is now often considered the defining element of the middle class.

How did access to the college educations that were the thresholds to membership in the middle class open? Mostly through the GI Bill, and after that through the shift of selective institutions of higher education to merit based admissions in the 1960s and the parallel expansion of of state institutions of higher education to accommodate the needs of former soldiers entitled to it as a result of the GI Bill. The political resistance of the civil service that was created to meet this need to being downsized (at a time when higher education employees largely weren't unionized) and student radicalism, rather than labor union efforts, does more to explain why the gates to higher education remained open.

Conclusion

Does all of this mean that unions can't play an important role in strengthening the American middle class? No. They are eager to step up to the challenge and remake themselves as a movement, and it is a task worth taking on.

But, as a matter of history, it is not at all clear that unions played an important part in creating the middle class, which was instead apparently driven by the widening availability of higher education. Instead, unions actually worked hard to secure justice for the American working class and seemed to be making good headway in doing so until sometime around 1970, when that social class in American life entered a period of seemingly permanent economic stagnation.

The Entrenched Politician-Voter Disconnect

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

- Sir Winston Churchill, British politician (1874 - 1965)

Churchill's wisdom has much to be said for it, except that it doesn't do much to tell us which kind of democracy is to be preferred to the alternatives.

An important flaw of the American system, and some similar systems, is that it deeply and fundamentally entrenches a process that naturally produces an unstable equilibrium that is at always odds with voter desires in one direction or the other, rather than a stable process that consistently produces elected representatives who seek to maximize the popularity of the decisions made by the government.



Enik Rising (Seth Masket's blog) reports research that he and Hans Noel have done with a clever experimental design that establishes empirically and rigorously the empirical wisdom that:

There are actually plenty of moderate Assembly districts in California; there are basically no moderate Assembly members. Virtually every Democrat in the Assembly is more liberal than her district; virtually every Republican member is more conservative than her district. . . .

We also find that members of the majority party tend to deviate further from their districts than members of the minority party do. Time out of office, we suggest, causes the minority party to try to moderate to win back the majority.

The study focused on California, but its conclusions almost surely hold for all but a couple of states in the United States (Nebraska and Louisiana may be exceptions).

Actual partisanship in legislative districts has a bell curve distribution. Elected legislators have a bimodal distribution, like a two humped camel. The political middle is systemically underpopulated by elected officials, despite the fact that the vast majority of voters are in the political middle between the typical elected Democrat and the typical elected Republican on the spectrum of ideology from the political left to the political right.

The study is focused, appropriately, on the facts, rather than the causes for those facts. But, political theory would suggest that this outcome is a very natural and direct consequence of our election laws and legislative process.

The Electoral Bias Against Moderation

Single member plurality district election system naturally gravitates towards having two dominant political parties in any one geographic area. In that system, adding a new credible candidate to the mix hurts that candidate's allies and helps that candidate's enemies. In order to mitigate mutually self-destructive behavior, we have entrenched, in the United States, a two party system in which the political left and the political right choose nominees in partisan primaries and then face off against each other.

The single member plurality district system doesn't necessarily have to create a two party system. It can support regional parties that have majority support in a particular area, like a Quebec Nationalist party or Irish Republican Party. It also doesn't require that the party of the right be the same everywhere, or that the party of the left be the same everywhere. Canadians have one party of the right to the West of Ontario, and another one, the Tory's to the East. One U.S. States have a Democrat-Farm-Labor Party rather than a Democratic party. The U.S. historically used to have, de facto, Dixiecrats in some parts of the country, and Democrats in other partys of the country, both against a common Republican party.

But, for distinct regional parties to emerge, something has to give that region a strong identity. The more homogeneous a region is politically, the less prone it is to develop a distinct political party.

A Majority Requirement As a Weak Fix

A weak solution to this problem is to use French style elections, which have been adopted in Louisiana, Denver and in a less pure form, in a handful of states, where the winner of the election needs to get a majority of the votes cast to win in the first round, with the top two vote getters facing off in a second round.

While this isn't immune to the pathology that similar candidates tend to undermine each other, it eliminates the requirement that a candidate wanting to make it into the second round must have a plurality coalition made up entirely of partisan voters on the right, or partisan voters on the left. A coalition of unaffiliated and bipartisan moderate voters can also secure a candidate a second round slot.

More generally, in its pure form, it is more more neutral towards the number of political parties competing in the district than a traditional two party system. Not surprisingly, Louisiana has historically been the source of moderate candidates in both the Democratic and Republican political parties.

Proportional Representation As A Strong Fix

A stronger solution to this problem would be a true proportional representation system that doesn't penalize two political parties for having similar views without not actually merging. In a system where each voter picks on political party and that party gets a number of seats proportional to the share of the vote received by that political party, the sensible thing for a voter to do is the pick the party most closely aligned with their views and a political party doesn't face a penalty for being small unless its market share approaches the treshold minimum percentage necessary to secure representation in the legislature (typically in the low single digit percentages). A proportional representation system also allows representation of parties that have a majority in no particular district.

This kind of true multi-party system, which naturally gravitated towards roughly four to eight major political parties, leads to unequal sized clusters of voters with much more homogeneous views.

The Legislative Bias Against Moderation

When Are Coalitions Made? How Stable Must They Be?

In an idealized two party system, coalitions need to be assembled before the election. In an idealized multi-party system, coalitions are made after the election.

In a parliamentary system, a governing coalition forming a legislative majority, need to hold together on all major issues for the political system to function. The legislative leader becomes the head of government (i.e. the Prime Minister) who runs government on a day to day basis. If the coalition that put the Prime Minister in place fails to secure majority support for any major proposal, the Prime Minister will typicall then lose a "no confidence" vote in short order, and new elections will typically be held.

Somewhat complicating the matter of coalition building is that American legislative coalitions don't need to be very stable across all or most issues. Since we have a strong President whose tenure doesn't hinge upon maintaining a legislative majority (indeed our current President doesn't have one), the executive branch can continue to function and carry out the business of government even when one coalition of legislators may prevail on one set on issues, and another coalition of legislators may prevail on a different set of issues.

Historically, for example, the U.S. had a de facto "two and a half" party system at the national Congressional level. One domestic economic issues Democrats generally united against Republicans. But, on matters of national defense and social issues like race, Southern Democrats often allied themselves with Republicans against Northern Democrats. The Democratic Presidential nomination race reflected the vacillation between these two factions.

This three party system allowed the party that was moderate on any issue where there was no consensus among the three parties to prevail, moderating the process as a whole to some extent.

Today, after a process called "realignment" that has largely run its course, this isn't the case any more. There are few notable blocks of "moderates" in either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party in Congress who deviate from their party in a systematic way on a particular way. The Blue Dog faction in the Democratic Party has withered, as has the faction of Northeastern social moderate Republicans. We have a relatively pure party of the political left and a relatively pure party of the political right, and they are quite evenly matched on the national political scene.

The Majoritarian Legislative Process Has A Hidden Bias Against Moderation

Of course, some of the partisanship we see at the legislative level is a product not just of a two party electoral system, but is inherent in the legislative process itself. Legislative decision making generally involved for or against voting on politically controversial issues. Partisans get the results most to their liking when they favor proposals the secure majorities, but only the narrowest majorities possible. It is natural, in this context, for legislators to informally rank themselves from the political left to the political right, and for proposals that require legislators to form an allegiance with one side or the other to be common.

Thus, even in multi-party proportional representation system, governing coalitions that are clearly right leaning, or clearly left leaning are the norm. Governing coalitions like the Penteparti system of Italy, in which five mainstream parties formed repeated unstable and short lived coalitions in the political center in a calculated effort to exclude old school communists on the left, and old school fascists on the right, ar the exception, except in times of national peril from an outside force like the unity governments of the United Kingdom during World War II.

Moderates are more favored in a place like the U.S. Senate, that is not strictly majoritarian, with most proposals from the left or the right requiring supermajority support, than in the U.S. House, where majority rule prevails.

In order to favor the kind of moderate policies that voters in the political center favor, you need not only an electoral system that doesn't naturally generate a bimodal distribution of legislators, but also a legislative process that has stronger incentives to find supermajority, rather than mere majority support for legislation.

Supermajority Requirements Come At The Risk of Deadlock

Favoring supermajorities, however, comes at a cost. Any requirement that there be more than majority support for a measure in a single legislative body with ultimate say over the matter creates a risk that the system will be overconstrained and fail to produce action in situations where there is no acceptable status quo.

In the United States, recess appointment power and a strong Presidency prevent the status quo of all important positions in the government going unfilled for lack of a resolution to deadlocks between a nominating executive and a ratifying Senate. But, at both the state and at the federal level, it remains possible for a lack of an ability to reach consensus in a deterministic way on a budget bill to produce a government shutdown, something that House Republicans on one side, and Senate Democrats and the President on the other, have been dancing with in the lame duck session of the 2010 Congress and the current Congress.

Probably the most notable recent example of an overconstrained set of legislative rules in recent memory is that of the Iraqi Constitution, which requires supermajority support to choose a President and Prime Minister, at a time when there is stark disagreement between well defined factions that individually lack that supermajority (whose moderate unanimity the constitution attempted to coax). The result has been many months of government deadlock due to a lack of the required consensus. Afghanistan's constitution, notably, in contrast, was carefully crafted to allow the President to impose a budget and appointees in the absence of constructive disagreement by a legislative majority on an alternative (despite the fact that Afghanistan has less well defined factions in any case).

Supermajority Processes In Practice

The best examples of supermajority incentives in the legislative process are probably the adminsitrative law notice and comment process, and the Quaker meeting process, each of which hinges on having a "honest third party" receive input and try to formulate from the input a maximally popular (in the case of administrative rule making) or maximal consensus (in the case of Quaker meeting decision making) stance, by taking into account the details of the concerns expressed.

Monarchs, because they are well positioned to be that honest third party, can, if they are not politically tone deaf, secure support in the fact of partisan elected bodies, precisely by favoring the middle against partisan majorities, and favoring solutions that would secure supermajority support over those that would secure mere majority support.

I think that the Founders probably hoped (largely in vain) for that kind of dynamic to play out in the American political system, something that failed largely because the Presidential election system got locked into the two party dichotomy. It isn't implausible to think that if the Presidential election process could be redesigned to decouple it from partisan politics and instead have this office elected in a way that favored moderates, that a similar dynamic could be established, even without reform at the legislative level, through the veto power.

Indeed, I think it is a fair hypothesis that Governor Ritter's experience with consensus oriented politics as the norm from his days as a special interest advocate for Colorado's District Attorneys' Association may help explain a great deal of his approach to dealing with the Colorado General Assembly, in which he frequently cited process rather than substance oriented objections to legislation in veto messages.

Good legislators in the existing legislative process frequently try to craft such agreements in "smoke filled room" negotiations involving interested parties with a goal of reaching "kumbaya" (i.e. a consensus of the interested parties to support a bill). But, this kind of deal making and mutal accomodation reaching is ill suited to the formal legislative process.

Consensus or supermajority oriented politics are actually much more common than most people would think, indeed, it is the norm. This is because partisan caucuses and special interest groups much each reach consensus or something close to it in order to move boldly on legislative proposals. They tend to stay silent and refrain from acting in the absence of consensus.

Conclusion

In the absence of divided government (something that both the U.S. Congress and Colorado General Assembly are experiencing right now), there is little incentive to stretch beyond a majority supported compromise.

So, in American politics, voters are left between insisting that government function with deals negotiated between the left and right in exchange for a risk a damaging deadlock, within divided government, and government by a right of center, or left of center consensus with little to encourage it to be inclusive.

Friday Web Comic: Hot Mess

Do you ever have conflicted feelings about how to respond to a situation when you were in high school? What if those feelings were represented by have a dozen lushly colored invisible stuffed animals?

This is the simple, but delightfully readable premise of the charming web comic Hot Mess, which is join production: "Story by Diana Falzone and Geoff Skinner, Art by Emily Chan, Lettering by Thomas Mauer and Edits by Lauren Perry." And, alas, the animals do not yet include an invisible pink unicorn. Click through the link to see it.

Elements Of Ideal World

Charles Stross has bemoaned at his excellent blog the shortage of writers of utopian, as opposed to dytopian science fiction. There aren't enough people envisioning a positive visions of a good society of the future. I'll take a stab at some pieces of what that should look like today.

Health Care

* Health care billing is invisible to the patient who presents an insurance card, pays a co-pay that is easily determined and known in advance, and never hears about the financial part of the transaction again. The behind the scenes billing process would be highly automated, provide appropriate incentives to health care providers, resistant to fraud and inexpensive.

* A larger share of health care services would be provided by reasonably autonomous health care professionals less expensive and less comprehensively trained, but still carefully technically trained, on a par in expertise and compensation with nurse practioners, physician's assistants, EMTs, and midwives.

* The health care system, somehow or other, would provide universal coverage regardless of ability to pay, and everyone who worked a full working life would be in a pension system that would assure them a tolerable standard of living that was not deeply less generous than the one they enjoyed while they were working.

* A comprehensive, evidence based set of lifestyle recommendations for a healthy life would be easy to understand, easy to access, annotated with the genuine impacts of not following them and their evidentiary basis, and widely followed.

* A comprehensive, easy to access, evidence based authoritative catalog of ineffective treatment for medical conditions would be available as a persausive tool, and false marketing of ineffective treatments with medical claims would be regulated.

* A standard part of the labor and delivery package for every child will be a full genome and biomarker analysis that would become a part of that child's medical file for life and would be available on a privacy protected basis for medical researchers, and would be digested automatically for parents in a way that flagged issues and traits relevant to the child's future mental and physical health care, and educational and parenting needs.

* Cavities would be dramatically reduced by a "vaccine" administered to children around the same time as other childhood vaccines.

* Effective vaccines would be available and widely administered for all significantly harmful viral illnesses.

* Effective treatments to end the causes of injuries and diseases like Type II diabetes, cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, spinal injuries, and autoimmune disorders (like M.S. and Lupus) would exist and provide relatively inexpensive mostly outpatient treatment.

* Birth control would be near universal for those not ideologically opposed to it from puberty onward, in place until an affirmative decision to have a child was made, capable of being ended without negative long term effects, and not disruptive of normal hormonal balances.

* Effective permanent correction of nearsightedness would be widely available and have an extremely low failure rate.

Mental Health

* Mental health care would be easy to access even by impaired people, would be provided on a categorical basis without regular eligibility evaluation to people diagnosed with conditions that are generally life long (while also having the capacity to address acute and temporary issues), would employ mostly professionals with less comprehensive education and compensation than M.D. trained psychiatrists but the authority to prescribe mental health meds and specialized technical training in mental health care. This would be handled on a more wholistic model than the transactional disease model common today - most mental health patients would see a treating professional at least once or twice a year their home and at least once or twice a year within some context of their daily life outside their home and outside the professional's office.

* Substance abuse would be treatable highly effectively with drugs. Improved, cheap diagnostic "labs on a chip" would facilite more accurate diagnosis of mental health conditions and would reduce the amount of trial and error involved in developing optimal treatment plans.

* An effective permanent "cure" for PTSD would be developed.

* There would be significant "nudges" to influence people needing it to obtain mental health care without going all the way to a court order to compel it involuntariliy in the vast majority of case.

* Evidence based, reliable risk assessment tools and early warning systems would identify people who should not possess firearms due to their current mental health and be implemented in a way that provides genuine and effective barriers to access to firearms for those individuals during those periods.

* The stigma of needing mental health care would be reduced. Indeed, mental health care might be integrated into a larger comprehensive system that reviewed the overall well being of each individual on a regular basis in a wide variety of respects.

* Minimally restrictive residential options for significantly impaired individuals with mental health issues would be about as common as and about as decent as assisted living facilities for the elderly are today.

* There would be adequate psychiatric hospital resources for the most severely impaired individuals with mental health issues, sometime accute and sometimes long term, which would be comparable in quality of life to the nicer private rehab centers today.

Transportation

* Medium and large sized cities would have transit systems that would make up a large share of intracity passenger and parcel traffic, and all places would have transit systems sufficient to meet the needs of those who can't drive.

* Intracity transportation, including cargo delivery, would be almost entirely with electrically powered vehicles in urban areas, and these vehicles would have enhanced safety systems to intervene in cases of operator error or incapacity. Intercity freight bound for urban areas even as small as very small cities and towns would move predominantly by rail rather than trucks.

* High speed rail would have a large share of of inter-city passenger and parcel traffic for distances of under three hundred miles between major urban centers and high volume destinations.

* A family taking a trip on an airplane for Thanksgiving or Christmas could reasonable expect to arrive at an airport 45 minutes before takeoff and make their flight; business traveler traveling light at non-peak times could reasonable expect to arrive at an airport an airport 30 minutes before takeoff and make their flight. Checking baggage would add only about 10 minutes to a typical traveller's travel time.

* Commercial airports would routinely have good quality transit that is comfortable, accomodate typical amounts of luggage easily, and be faster than travelling by car and parking at the airport, and no more expensive than it is to drive to an airport in a car and park there now.

* Most ocean freighters would use some form of sail to be more fuel efficient.

* Very low population density areas would be connected by airplanes, boats, and airships rather than roads, which would be removed from these areas.

* Hydrocarbon fueled vehicles would be predominantly used in niche applications in rural settings and in ocean fishing and pleasure boats where a dense electrical repowering grid for vehicles taking short intracity trips was not practical.

Energy

* Electric vehicles, wider use of transit and freight rail, and wider use of alternative fuels would dramatically reduce petroleum consumption.

* Wider use of renewable energy sources like improved solar and wind technology, tidal power, heat pumps with underground loops, and micro-hydropower would reduce coal consumption.

* Comprehensive conservation efforts would reduce energy consumption through means like better insulation, less electricity hungry appliances and devices, and more efficient energy storage devices.

* Nuclear fusion power including recycling of spent high level nuclear waste would provide a much larger share of electrical power and would be available in small scale versions that do not pose weapons proliferation risks in many small communities. Reasonably safe nuclear waste diposal facilities would come on line eliminating existing backlogs and meeting future needs.

* A significant share of coal consumption would involve converting coal into synthetic liquid and gas phase hydrocarbon fuels that would reduce the amount of air pollution generated by the coal. Coal burning would be subject to carbon taxes that reflected their environmental impact and as a result would be used only in niche applications where there were not other economically viable alternatives.

Food, Agriculture and Rural Life

* Organic farming would become the predominant type of agricultural production for most kinds of agricultural products. Petrochemical use in agriculture would decline greatly.

* Automation and other technologies would continue to increase productivity of farms per farmer resulting in a greatly decreased population in places with farm economies. Farmers would be more affluent as a result, and would mostly send their children to boarding schools for middle school and high school since population densities would be too low to support decent local day schools close enough to home.

* Most fish would be produced in fish farms. Better management of commercial fishing and water pollution would restore wild fisheries as well.

* Subsidies for rural living designed to assist economically stuggling farmers would be ended, this would also discourage exurban living.

* Rural governments would be consolidated to serve much larger rural populations over much larger areas and improve the professionalism of the services they provide.

* Meat consumption as a share of total food consumption would be reduced somewhat and more diverse kinds of meats would be available at affordable prices.

* Door to door delivery of mail in rural areas where it is not cost effective to do so would be replaced by post office pickup.

Education

* A system of state funded, secular schools would operate like charter schools do today and local elected school boards would cease to exist. Students would be allowed to choose to attend any of these school free of charge, schools would be compensated based on enrollment and enrolled student need, schools that failed to secure enough students choosing to attend or failed to meet minimum standards would fold, and neither the state board of education nor elected local school board would have day to day managerial control over their operations. Instead, there would be basic health and safety standards, minimum business model approvals, some standardization of the admissions and transfer process, and impartial government administered student performance and satisfaction evaluations. The schools would have the same sort of legal status as public colleges and universities as governmental entities subject to constitutional standards applicable to public actors such as due process and the First Amendment.

* A system of higher education funding that would provide financial assistance to students through scholarships with both need and merit components. The system would commit to meeting 100% of financial need through grants for the best students, 100% of financial need through a combination of grants and loans (no more than 50% loans) for students with less academic merit, and on public grant or loan assistance for academic higher education for studnets with only marginal academic merit.

* Quality vocational education programs would be a respectable and reasonably popular choice for students who were not particularly strong academically and completion of these program would provide graduates with a reasonable prospect of a steady employment in an upper working class to middle middle class career.

* High school graduates would leave school with significant practical knowledge of physical health and mental health matters in connection with the health care system, to the extent necessary to care for themselves, family members, and strangers in emergency situations in a way consistent with evidence based best practices in a manner rooted in a genuine layman's level understanding of the physical processes behind what they need to do.

* Students at high risk of failing academically, ending up engaged in criminal activity, lifelong economic failure, and dysfunctional relationships would be accurately identified by an early warning system in place by pre-school that would devote significant resources starting as early as possible to support them in changing their course, and to the extent that high risks are not corrected by adulthood to intervene appropriately to protect them and others in a pro-active way that is only actually punitive to the extent that it authorized by crimes, child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, financial defaults or similar events.

Criminal Justice

* Criminal defendants are entitled to a public defender with a manageable case load who is paid enough to attract competent lawyers without regard to ability to pay. Criminal defendants can opt to use the funds that would have been used for their defense to apply towards the cost of hiring private counsel instead.

* The primary penalty for failing to enter into a plea bargain would be a court cost assessed against defendants found guilty to cover the cost of the public defender, the prosecutor, and the judicial system in the case, rather than large differences in sentencing outcomes.

* Evidence based statistical evaluation instruments would pay a strong part in determing the kind of sentence appropriate for particular crimes, and the evidence would be regularly re-evaluated in a transparent and open process. Only individuals whose release would pose a significant threat to others from serious recidivism incidents would be released.

* The criminal justice system would make wider use of sanctions intermediate between probation and long periods of incarceration in prisons, particularly for non-violent offenses, such as electrically monitored house arrest, large but proportionate fines and restitution awards, and low security community corrections/low security facilities for low risk prisoners.

* The process of integrating incarcerated individuals back into the community would be more structured, more supportive and less punitive, particularly for the first two or three years, in order to reduce recidivism.

* Prostitution and recreational drug use would be regulated from a public health perspective, but not criminalized.

* Incarceration rates would be significantly lower.

* Prisons would be safer for prisoners and guards, and prison gangs would be more effectively disrupted.

* Law enforcement officers who were caught lying or engaging in police brutality would routinely and promptly be fired even in cases where the proof of the misconduct while solid, was not beyond a reasonable doubt, and would be entered into a national registry of bad cops. The past cases of bad cops would then routinely and systematically investigated to determine if anyone else had been a victim of misconduct by the officer, and law enforcement associates of dismissed bad cops would be have their past patterns of conduct investigated. Incentives to engage in police misconduct would be identified and addressed. Law enforcement officers who did not personally engage in misconduct would have strong incentives individually and collectively to report it and cooperate in investigating it. Employers of law enforcement officials would be vicarciously liable for misconduct by their law enforcement employees without regard to fault.

* A systematic process to allow for the early release of individuals who were given excessive sentences that would not longer be imposed under existing law and sentencing standards whose post-incarceration conduct was acceptable, would be established.

Family Law

* Gay marriage would be legal and accepted.

* The welfare state and legal system would be more accomodating of and sensitive to the needs and expectations of people in extended family and communal living arrangement situations.

* An early warning system and societal norms would encourage earlier intervention in potentially coercive or violent relationships by better informing and empowering potential victims.

* The financial consequences of a divorce in terms of property division and maintenance would be highly predictable due to well defined and easy to apply rules that afford at least rough justice, and as a result, would be far less acrimonious.

* Disputes over parenting time, parental decision making, child abuse and neglect and paternity would be segregated into legal system separate from the financial part of a divorce that would apply without regard to marital status. In this system, advocates for each party, who would not necessarily be lawyer, would be available without regard to ability to pay. This system would be set up to reflect the fact that parenting issues are ongoing matters, rather than something to be resolved once and for all.

Pakistani Politics Still Violent

"A Pakistani government minister who had said he was getting death threats because of his opposition to a controversial blasphemy law was shot to death Wednesday.

Shahbaz Bhatti was the only Christian member of the Cabinet in Pakistan, where 95 percent of people are Muslim. He served as the government’s minister of minority affairs....

The Taliban claimed responsibility. “(The) assassination of Bhatti is a message to all of those who are against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws,” said Ihsanullah Ihsan, a Taliban spokesman."

Two months ago, a governor of a Pakistan state — Salman Taseer — was murdered for the same reason.

From here.

How do you run a democratic civilian government when senior government officials who take positions on issues (never mind waiting around to see how the political and legal process resolved the dispute), that somebody else in the system doesn't like, are routinely murdered or executed?

It has been this way for a long time. Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951, after which the first President, Iskander Mirza declared martial law and discarded the constitution, which lead to his removal from office in a coup by General Ayub Khan, the same day, October 7, 1958.

Zulifikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan's People's Party became President after a democratic election on December 20, 1971, was replaced in a coup in July 1977, and was executed for complicity in a 1974 political murder on April 4, 1979.

President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq was killed when his plane exploded in August 1988. Suffice it to say that it certainly sounds like suspicious circumstance.

Benazir Bhutto (the late Zulifikar Ali Bhutto's daughter) became Prime Minister in 1988, was removed by the President based on corruption charges August 1990, returned to power October 1990, and was removed for more corruption charges November 1996.

A coup removed the civilian regime entirely over dissatisfaction with the decisions on military matter being made by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on October 12, 1999, and the leading General Pevez Musharraf declared himself to be President on June 20, 2001. Between then and 2007, he survived four assassination attempts.

More than 140 people died in a suicide bomber's unsuccessful attempt to kill Benazir Bhutto as she campaigned for President after eight years in exile on October 18, 2007, and she was successfully assassinated December 27, 2007 after a political rally, in which the leaders of the regime of Pakistan in power at the time is accused of being complicit.

Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari lead the Pakistan Peoples Party to an electoral victory Febraury 18, 2008, and after street protests and a threatened impeachment, General Musharraf stepped down in August, and Zardari was sworn in as President.

This, of course, just includes the highlights, without mentioning assassinations and assassination attempts on lower level figures, and a constant low level parade of other political killings and suicide bombings. For example, seven more famous political assassinations in Pakistan can be found here (many of which are discussed with more narration here.) I've also omitted multiple wars, some still in progress today. The separation of Pakistan from India was not bloodless. One bloody civil war split Bangladesh and Pakistan into separate countries in the 1970s. There have been wars with India over the Kashmir and out of general mutual antipathy. There have been subnational insurgencies and violent counterinsurgencies in the country's "frontier provinces" since 1958, and one of them is in progress right now.

Xe Services, which is currently embroiled in revelations related to the arrest of a U.S. CIA contractor who used to work for them, was accused in 2009 of having conducted political assassinations of its own without Presidential approval. This is in addition to the many Presidentially authorized CIA assassinations of people believed to be involved with the Taliban, mostly with drone deployed missiles, pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force by Congress following 9/11.

Pakistan is not Yemen. It is a developing country with a viable middle class and more than a hundred million people, with one of the oldest histories of civilization in the world, and a substantial GDP, that has nuclear weapons, not a sparsely populated poor nation in the middle of a desert. In theory, it is a nation of Muslims who have a lot in common with each other in a "nation-state" sense.

Even without any new provocations, it would take a lifetime just to settle the scores for all the political killings that have occurred so far. A simple change of President pursuant to election results in the ordinary manner, without assassinations, impeachments or coups, that takes place in the United States every four to eight years, most of the time, is almost unprecedented in Pakistan.

As much as we can become concerned with minor happenings in Pakistan, the very basics of orderly, peaceful civilian government of any kind seem elusive.

Short Takes

* Spinal fluid biomarkers can distinguish between people suffering from Lyme disease (a tick carried infectious agent), Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (probably a viral condition with a long latency period), and uninfected individuals. This is important first, because Lyme disease and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can present with similar symptoms, and second, because diagnosing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and even finding ways for sufferers to convince people that they have a genuine biologically caused disease rather than simply being lazy, is a major challenge.

* The Kalash people in a remote part of the Hindu Kush Mountain range are one of the most genetically distinct populations in the world. When one has a computer break the world's autosomal genetics into the most distinct possible seven clusters, the clusters that you get are: African, European, South Asian, East Asian, Papuan, indigenous American and Kalash.

Their Y-DNA haplogroups (from a sample of about 43 people) are as follows:
L3a 22.7% (most common in Pakistan)
H1* 20.5% (most common in South Asia)
R1a 18.2% (most common in Eastern Europe and South Asia)
G 18.2% (most common in Southern Europe, Anatolia, Druze, Brahui and Pashtuns)
J2 9.1% (most common in Anatolia and where Indo-Europeans have had an impact)
R* 6.8% (most common in Thailand, Indonesia, the Phillipines and Australian aborigines)
R1* 2.3% (most common in indigenous Americans)
L* 2.3%. (most common in South Asia)

Their mtDNA haplogroups (from a sample of 44 people) are as follows:
pre-HV 22.7% (most common in Socotri, North Africa, Iran and Arabia)
HV* 4.5%
H 4.5% (the modal haplogroup of Europe)
U2e 15.9% (most common in South Asia)
U4 34.1% (most common in Central Asia)
U7 2.3% (most common in South Asia)
J1 2.3%
J2 9.1%
T* 4.5%

They speak a language from the Dardic branch of the Indo-European family (one of the more basal of the Indo-Iranian part of the late language family), and practice a polytheistic religion.

They are between areas that areas typically Central Asian and areas that are typically South Asian in genetic makeup. Their traditions place them as a lost contingent of Alexander the Great's army, but given their uniparental markers, the genetic makeup, their particularly contingent would have had to have picked up members mostly from the area from Anatolia to the Hindu Kush. Their Dardic language is also an anomaly for an isolated community claiming to descend from the Greeks, they lack common distinctively Greek uniparental markers, and their religion is close to Hinduism than it is to Greek pantheistic beliefs. An origin a millennium or two earlier (if not much more ancient) would seem to be a better fit for the facts.

Given their autosomal makeup, any new arrivals in the region from somewhere would have had to either admixed substantially with a relict population that was largely wiped out or overwhelmed genetically elsewhere such as Europe and Central Asia's pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers, or South Asian hunter-gatherer populations disrupted by Munda, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan populations respectively. Alternately, they might have undergone significant selectively driven evolution analogous to that found in Tibetans as a result of living at high altitudes. The case for incorporation of a relict Central Asian hunter-gatherer population is most strongly supported by the modal mtDNA haplogroup U4, which was one of the second most common types found in ancient DNA from Central Asian hunter-gatherers.

* There are a couple of kinds of invasive ants that have an unusual reproductive system. Future queens are clones of the current queen. Future drones (reproducing males) are clones of their fathers. Workers, who do not reproduce, have a mix of the queen and the drone's genes similar to that of ordinary sexually reproducing animals. (I'll try to find a reference later).

* As a thought experiment, it is interesting to consider would it would look like to have a society where a human or near human species with reproduction system in which only half of women had children, but they had an average of four and a half surviving descendants, assuring the replacement of the species. There are several different permutations of this that would be possible. Half of children could be gay. Half of the children could be infertile (perhaps clones of their same sex parent, or perhaps surgically or chemically neutered). Half of females could be in "harems" like those of alpha dominated gorillas or lions, and only alphas might have the pheromones necessary to trigger reproduction. One imagines that such a society might resemble the Byzantine courts.

Alternately, one could imagine a society where half the women were in a social class that averaged surviving three children, while the other half the women were in a social class that average one surviving child. A study of the vital statistic of a Bronze Age society in Spain based on its burials and the inferred diets of the dead, which showed a minority elite with a high protein diet surviving at much greater rates than a "middle class" (perhaps soldiers) or an even more deprived underclass (perhaps servants or slaves), with this kind of demographics.

* There is a tendency in Anglo-American political economy to imagine a society with strong property rights and weak governments as a "state of nature" against which political action should be measured. But, this sense is to a great extent ahistorical, particularly in farming and more urbanized societies. The oldest Minoan Linear A script is preserves administrative records of ration distribution systems, basically welfare states, that had strong parallels in Sumeria, Egypt, the Hebrew Bible and Rome - i.e. all of the major civilizations of the Mediterranean of the Copper Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, and arguably via feudal societies into to the Middle Ages. There also seems to be evidence that these were command economies in which soldiers played an integral economic part, perhaps along the lines of the large role played by military owned enterprises in the civilian economies of modern Egypt and China. Likewise, fedual societies were basically agrarian economies run on a military footing with involuntary serf labor.

Decentralized market driven economies with contract rights and private property as an important organizing principle doesn't really emerge as the predominant component of the economy until after the Middle Ages end in Europe.

* NPR made some notable observations about the Middle Eastern oil states that are experiencing revolutions at the moment. Generally speaking, these states don't impose significant taxes on non-petroleum activities. Oil money funds government operations including strong military forces and a significant welfare state. This helps explain why the oil rich states of the Middle East have managed to survive while being so undemocratic. Historically, constitutional monarchy and republican government in cases like Rome, England and France have their roots in the need of a monarch to obtain consent of representatives of people who were going to be required to pay taxes to support the state. Taxes are the price of democracy.

* Some of the dates assigned to remains used to argue for an early presence of modern humans in Europe engaged in relatively primative economic industry have been revised upon further examination to more recent dates. Remains previously touted as more than 30,000 years old, which had "long been considered to be the earliest evidence of the remains of modern Homo sapiens anywhere in Europe" in Southern France and Southwest Germany have been re-examined within the last decade and determined to have actually been less than 10,000 years old.

This also influences how one conceptualizes the Chatelperronian lithic industry in Europe, which in turn relates to how smart we think the Neanderthals were. The prior and more primative Mousterian industry is clearly associated with Neanderthals. The industry that follows the Chatelperronian is associated clearly with modern humans. The Chatelperronian has traditionally been associated with Neanderthals as well, but some researchers have argued for it as "an independent development by Neanderthals (d'Errico et al. 1998)" while others "see the Chatelperronian as the result of the acculturation of Neanderthals by modern humans (Mellars 2005)." People care, because if the Chatelperronian was an independent Neanderthal invention, then maybe they were pretty smart and advancing their technology just as the humans did when climate conditions improved. In contrast, the opposite extreme would be to argue that admixture of modern human traits into Neanderthal populations is the only reason that they were able to innovate as much as they did even in the relatively primate Chatelperronian era. Between the two extremes is the possibility that the Neanderthals were capable of mimicing modern human Upper Paleolithic lithic industries, even if they would have been hard put to develop it themselves.

John Hawks, approaching the same underlying question of Neanderthal intelligence from another angle wonders if the ability of people born blind to repurpose their visual centers for language doesn't suggest that language is less hard wired, and hence, less likely to require genetic evolution, than has been often assumed: "Kaschube and colleagues showed that the apparent developmental robusticity of the visual cortex could be maintained by simple rules of self-organization. It doesn't take specialized genetic control to create a visual cortex, it just takes information structured in the right way to flip a few genetic triggers" and the right kind of environmental exposures. As he explains:

The blind subjects tell us that the ground for language processing is almost as fertile elsewhere in the cortex. Many brain areas have the genetic equipment to recruit and organize neurons into useful circuits for language processing. Language development is developmentally robust because it can rely on a rich language environment, not because of genetic standardization. The basic problems of language evolution must be explained by showing how robust language communities emerged. I don't preclude genetics, far from it -- weaker language environments may have become stronger because of evolutionary change. But that evolution must have been substantially domain-general, because language processing is not specifically canalized by genetics.

I like this scenario because it means we shouldn't be looking for lots of language-specific genetic changes in the last few hundred thousand years. The Neandertal genome suggests that there may not have been any at all.

My second speculation: If the language environment determines the instantiation of language processing, then brains must be substantially different in the way they process language. Children experience different language environments -- not only different languages, but different microenvironments within language communities. Only strong genetic controls could canalize brains despite the differences in their language environments. In brains where language processing emerges readily in the visual cortex, genetic controls cannot possibly synchronize brains in the face of environmental variation.

* A case is being made that the strong genetic discontinuity between South Asia and Southeast Asia, despite the lack of an obviously inpenetrable geographic barrier is attributable to the effects of the Toba volcano erruption, that while not wiping out the modern human population in South Asia, did seriously disrupt and reshape it:

Oppenheimer . . . [suggests] that the prolonged ash cloud could have devastated all or most of India, especially both M and N related populations in the east and south, closest to the volcano. He hypothesizes that this area could then have been repopulated by M dominated groups immigrating from the east, who might then have spread, in a cline, to the rest of the subcontinent, while N-related groups to the west could have repopulated India from that region. This could have left India populated by more recent M and N hapolotypes than those found farther east[.]

He also associates this event with the distribution of tone languages which are found in Africa, "scattered among so many indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, southern China, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Melanesia" and in "northernmost reaches of the Indus valley . . . "would have been a likely spot where a branch of the Out of Africa migrants, who could have broken from the main group to travel north along the banks of the Indus, might have been able to survive the effects of Toba with their African traditions more or less intact. If tone language was part of their HMC inheritance, then that could explain the prevalence of tone language in this area today." Suggested musical linkages that might be legacies of this connection are discussed here.

The Future Of Farming

American farming has become a high technology modern industry.

Liberated Libyans Control Its Oil

As shown on the map above, from here, Tripoli, which is still controlled by Gaddafi's regime for the moment, in not connected to the main oil resources of Libya, which are found in the "Liberated" area of Libya. International asset freezes of the sovereign wealth of Libya in Western investments, and of the assets of Gaddafi and his close associates, further deprives him of financial resources, as does the reality that no international banker in his right mind would lend money to Gaddafi or his rump regime. NPR notes that oil shipments to Chinese tankers out of Benghazi in the East, which is rebel controlled, have already resumed.

Neither the Fezzan oasis societies, which apparently remain loyal to Gaddafi, nor the economic output of Tripoli, are at the heart of the economic lifeblood of Libya. It is a relatively pure version of a petrostate. Indeed, from the perspective of liberated East Libyans, if Tripoli remains under Gaddafi's thumb, this is all the better for them because they don't have to share their oil wealth with as many people.

A modern day emirate of Tripoli, without Libya's sovereign wealth, without oil money, and without political allies in either Benghazi or Tunisia, would rapidly deteriorate into something more like Somolia than an equal part-successor to Libya, perhaps even reverting to Somolian style piracy of the Mediterranean sea trade (as it did in the era of the Barbary pirates) until put down by regional navies. Indeed, Libya's last monarch, King Idris, ruled an emirate centered around Bengazi before he joined it in a personal union to the one centered around Tripoli. The two have been united only since the 1920s, about a decade before oil was discovered.

Possibilities

As suburban Tripoli encircling the central city appears to have already escaped Gaddafi's control, and his apparently delusion public front about the degree of control he has over his nation, one plausible outcome of the situation in Libya might be for Gaddafi to retreat to loyal territory in the Fezzan, perhaps anchored to the Mediterrean by the city of Sirt between Tripoli and Benghazi, in a rump Libya.

Historically, the area now known as Libya was regarded as three separate regions: Tripolitania in the northwest, centered on Tripoli; Cyrenaica in the northeast, focused on Benghazi; and Fezzan in the southwest, anchored by a few scattered oases.

Given the opportunity, I suspect that the people of Mediterranean Libya would willingly cede the name "Libya," the territory of the Gaddafi loyalist Fezzan, and even a hefty share of the nation's $30 billion sovereign wealth and the personal wealth of Gaddafi and his associates, in order to avoid a prolonged and bloody civil war. The Fezzan might even declare Gaddafi to be their King, an absolute one, which is a prize he would probably value more than riches, and confirm his son as Crown Prince. Without the ongoing source of funds to maintain a potent military form oil or a modern urban hub, the Fezzan would fade into obscurity as minor agricultural state of North Africa on a par with Chad or the Central African Republic, sustainable only by virtue of its sovereign wealth. Then again, perhaps he can succeed where the Egyptians in their similar Toshka scheme to grow crops in the desert have thus far only stuggled.

The Libyans on the coast might rechristen themselves the Federated Republics of Tripoli and Cyrenaica and might even reinstate a constitutional monarch who can trace roots to King Idris. There are currently two pretenders to that abrogated throne, so perhaps one could be a monarch of a Federal Republic of Tripoli, while the other could be a monarch of a Federal Republic of Cryenaica, bound together in a federation and defusing conflicts over succession in the fragile new regimes. Were one thinking expansively, one could even imagine that federation expanding to include the new post-dicatorship Tunisian Republic as well.

The Downside To Wash Park

For all my beloved Washington Park's virtues, we have at least one notable drawback. It seems that it, as well as nearby University Park, has a reputation for having for the worst At&T network cell phone coverage in the entire city of Denver, Colorado (truth be told, the digital television signal reception is pretty mediocre as well).

It so happens that there have been a somewhat fierce but obscure series of land use squabbles over the matter of building a new tower to address this shortfall (and related but more serious dead zones for EMS radios in the area), but apparently tech reporters at the Denver Post like Andy Vuong, don't talk much to the city beat reporters who cover such matters, or the paper may lack institutional memory - if it isn't readily discoverable via Google, it doesn't exist.

Wealth Inequality

Most scholars agree that wealth inequality in the United States is at historic highs, with some estimates suggesting that the top 1% of Americans hold nearly 50% of the wealth, topping even the levels seen just before the Great Depression in the 1920’s. . . . in the United States, the top wealth quintile owns 84% of the total wealth, the second highest 11%, [the third quintile 4%, the fourth quintile 0.2% and the last quintile 0.1%].

From here (Hat Tip Colorado Pols).

In Sweden, the quintiles share of national wealth are respectively 36%, 21%, 18%, 15% and 11%, a distribution preferred by 92% of Americans surveyed and even 89% of Americans with incomes in excess of $100,000 per year. This result, of course, in not terribly surprising, as the Swedish wealth distribution means more wealth for everyone in the bottom four quintiles and only slightly less wealth (collectively) for those in the top quintile who were are not in the top 1%. Indeed, the Swedish wealth distribution would probably be an improvement for everyone in the bottom 95% of the wealth distribution, and would be a deep reduction in wealth mostly for those in the top 2% of the wealth distribution.

Most Americans believe that wealth is distributed much more equally than it actually is and also believe that wealth should be distributed more equally than that, although perfect wealth equality is unpopular.

Moldable Metals

You know those supermaterials that advanced civilizations encountered by humans are always finding in science fiction movies? It looks like we've just discovered one. BMGs may be the next plastic.

[B]ulk metallic glasses (BMGs)- [are] metal alloys that have randomly arranged atoms as opposed to the orderly, crystalline structure found in ordinary metals-can be blow molded like plastics into complex shapes that can't be achieved using regular metal, yet without sacrificing the strength or durability that metal affords. Their findings are described online in the current issue of the journal Materials Today.

"These alloys look like ordinary metal but can be blow molded just as cheaply and as easily as plastic," Schroers said. So far the team has created a number of complex shapes-including seamless metallic bottles, watch cases, miniature resonators and biomedical implants-that can be molded in less than a minute and are twice as strong as typical steel.

The materials cost about the same as high-end steel, Schroers said, but can be processed as cheaply as plastic. The alloys are made up of different metals, including zirconium, nickel, titanium and copper.

The team blow molded the alloys at low temperatures and low pressures, where the bulk metallic glass softens dramatically and flows as easily as plastic but without crystallizing like regular metal. It's the low temperatures and low pressures that allowed the team to shape the BMGs with unprecedented ease, versatility and precision, Schroers said. In order to carefully control and maintain the ideal temperature for blow molding, the team shaped the BMGs in a vacuum or in fluid. "The trick is to avoid friction typically present in other forming techniques," Schroers said. "Blow molding completely eliminates friction, allowing us to create any number of complicated shapes, down to the nanoscale."

Schroers and his team are already using their new processing technique to fabricate miniature resonators for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-tiny mechanical devices powered by electricity-as well as gyroscopes and other resonator applications.

In addition, by blow molding the BMGs, the team was able to combine three separate steps in traditional metal processing (shaping, joining and finishing) into one, allowing them to carry out previously cumbersome, time- and energy-intensive processing in less than a minute.

From here.

Cosmological Numerology

A study released late in 2010, revealed that the estimate of the share of matter in the universe that is ordinary matter, as opposed to dark matter, was low by a factor of three, because the proportion of ordinary matter relative to dark matter in ellipical galaxies was underestimated. The estimated total amount of matter in the universe is unchanged, because that comes from mass measurements based on the lensing effect of entire galaxies on light that measures total mass rather than from estimates of the total number of individual stars and planets in galaxies multiplied by the estimated mass of each one.

The old estimate was that the universe was 4.6% ordinary matter, 23% dark matter, and the remainder "dark energy." Those are pretty weird numbers and no one has ventured a credible guess about how that came to be.

The new estimate comes up with some numbers that are quite different: 13.8% ordinary matter and 13.8% dark matter. Thus, the amount of ordinary matter and dark matter are almost exactly equal - a remarkable coincidence that wouldn't be hard to infer from a scenario in which energy from the big bang condenses into matter (called baryogenesis and leptogenesis) by a process by which half of matter created is in the ordinary sector, and half is in the "dark" sector, for example, from particles predicted to exist by supersymmetry. We already know, for example, that to the extent permitted by available mass-energy, the weak forces W boson has an equal chance of transforming into any available possible output fermions.

Another of the great unanswered questions of physics is "why is ordinary matter almost entirely made up of matter, rather than anti-matter?" A potential answer could be that almost all of the anti-matter, which we would otherwise expect to make up 50% of the mass in the universe, somehow turned into dark matter.

The fact that the weak force interacts with particles that have left partity, but not right parity, ignoring half of all the particles of matter in the universe, provides another 50-50 division of the matter in the universe that might drive a process that creates 50% ordinary matter and 50% dark matter in the universe.

The ratio of the total amount of matter in the universe to the total amount of dark energy in the universe is also an interesting number. Within the margin of accuracy of the measurement that ratio is "e", the exponential constant, which is often rounded to 2.78. I'm not aware of any specific theory in physics that predicts that ratio, but the equations of physics are awash with dimensionless fundamental constants like "e" and the expansion of the universe with which dark energy is associated is an exponential expansion process, so the ratio wouldn't be a terribly surprising one to fall out of the relevant equations.

Is this scientific proof? No. It is pure speculation of a basically numerological nature about the way that a theory that does have real meaning could produce numbers like these. But, it is an interesting observation, nonetheless, about a question, "why do we have the percentages of matter, dark matter and dark energy in the universe that we observe?", which could be relevant to answering those questions. In the ordinary case, science looks for relationships in emperical data first, and then comes up with hypothetical theories that could explain what could be causing those relationships. This kinds of observations advance that cause.

Health Insurers: Co-ops Too Awesome For Colorado

Usually, the argument for having the private for profit sector of the economy do something is that it lowers costs and is more efficient.

But, that isn't the argument that opponents of a plan to established a health care cooperative (i.e. a patient owned health insurance company) have made to Colorado's General Assembly in response to Senate Bill 168 which calls for establishing a commission to present the co-op proposal to voters in 2013.

According the today's Denver Daily News, "State Senator Shawn Mitchell, R-Broomfield, acknowledged that the plan itself does not create single-payer system in Colorado," but, he believes that it is likely that a co-op would expand and drive private carriers out of the market, becoming a single-payer or predominant payer in the state.

In other words, Mitchell believes that a co-op would provide a better deal to Colorado health care consumers that they would choose over the status quo of private health insurance companies.

Mark Reese, a spokesman for the Colorado Association of Health Plans, said as many of 20,000 people employed by the private health care insurance industry in Colorado would lose their jobs as a result of a universal cooperative.

Translation: Health insurance companies are so wildly inefficient that a health insurance cooperative could do the same job with 20,000 fewer people.

As Senator Mitchell notes, this would not be a single payer health care plan like they have in Canada:

Senate Bill 168 would create a board of health care and policy experts [funded with $1.2 million of private donations] to develop details for implementing a health care cooperative that would include all Coloradoans as members. . . .

Coloradoans would be allowed to kept their primary insurance provide and instead use the cooperative as a supplemental policy.

Coloradoans would also be allowed to choose medical provider that is not part of the system. In those cases, patients would be required to pay the gap between the cooperative's reimbursement and the provider's charges.

The status quo indicates that there is considerable truth to the argument of cooperative opponents that government can manage health insurance claims with fewer employees than health insurance companies do. The Medicaid program in Colorado, for example, processes all of its claims in the state for its 553,800 beneficiaries with fewer than 900 employees.

Co-operatives are alternatives to anti-trust regulation and government owned enterprises that rely on the say members have in how the co-operative is run to keep them working in the member's best interests.

If a health care co-operative will, as opponents claim, provide health care at a lower cost than health insurance companies do, by providing health care with 20,000 fewer health insurance company employees whose wasteful paperwork is driving up the cost of health care in Colorado, then I am all for it.

The last time I checked, the objective of Republicans and Democrats alike was to reduce health care costs and cut waste in the health insurance industry without making unnecessary cuts in the health care that was provided. Indeed, the Republican critics of health care reform in Congress specifically made a point of criticising health care reform's failure to include enough of a focus on cost savings.

One doesn't have to be a died in wool ideological supporter of co-operatives for co-operatives sake to say that co-operatives are a good option when consumers choose them the buy services also offered by investor owned corporations in circumstances where co-operatives provide lower prices through more efficient operations.

It isn't as if Republicans in Colorado as a whole have some deep ideological opposition to co-operatives as a form of business organization in any case. In rural Colorado, co-operatives are the primary way people get electricity, receive their telephone service, buy their farm supplies, store their grain, sell their crops, and buy their water. In Denver, Republicans make up a disproportionate share of people who send their children to pre-school through co-operatives, and many people in Colorado already get life insurance, disability insurance and casualty insurance from mutual insurance companies (which is just another name for a consumer's co-operative) like Northwestern Mutual or Amica. A citizen owned football team won the Superbowl this year. Almost every law firm, accounting firm and medical practice in the state is organized as an employee owned enterprise.

None of this changes how health care providers are organized. From their perspective, a health care co-operative is just one more health insurance company to deal with in the billing process - a big one, according to opponents, but not an organization that is actually providing medical services directly to patients.