Law & Politics Book Review on Law & Literature

Law & Politics Book Review has recently published an issue with short book reviews of many great works of literature with legal and political themes. The issue is available online here.

Here is the table of contents:

Introduction. . . . pp. 288-290.

Abbey, Edward. THE MONKEY WRENCH GANG. Reviewed by Darren Botello-Samson, Department of Social Sciences, Pittsburg State University. . . . pp.290-293.

Asimov, Isaac. I, ROBOT. Reviewed by Susan M. Behuniak, Department of Political Science, Le Moyne College. . . . pp.294-297.

Atwood, Margaret. THE HANDMAID’S TALE. Reviewed by Kathleen A. Cameron, Justice Studies, Social Sciences Department, Pittsburg State University. . . . pp.298-301.

Campbell, Bebe Moore. YOUR BLUES AIN’T LIKE MINE. Reviewed by Angela Mae Kupenda, Mississippi College School of Law. . . . pp.303-305.

Camus, Albert. THE STRANGER. Reviewed by David S. Mann, Department of Political Science, College of Charleston. . . . pp.306-309.

Carofiglio, Gianrico. INVOLUNTARY WITNESS. Reviewed by Christoph Konrath, Parliamentary Administration, Austrian Parliament. . . . pp.310-312.

Dickens, Charles. BLEAK HOUSE. Reviewed by R. B. Bernstein, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School. . . . pp.313-316.

Drury, Allen. ADVISE AND CONSENT. Reviewed by Trevor Parry-Giles, Department of Communication, University of Maryland. . . . pp.317-320.

Grisham, John. A TIME TO KILL. Reviewed by Laura J. Hatcher, Department of Political Science and Women’s Studies Program, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. . . . pp.321-324.

Guterson, David. SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS. Reviewed by Margaret S. Hrezo, Department of Political Science, Radford University. . . . pp.325-327.

Huxley, Aldous. BRAVE NEW WORLD. Reviewed by Tracy Lightcap, Department of Political Science, LaGrange College. . . . pp.328-331.

Kafka, Franz. THE TRIAL. Reviewed by Adelaide H. Villmoare, Department of Political Science, Vassar College. . . . pp.332-334.

Lee, Harper. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Reviewed by Richard A. Glenn, Department of Government and Political Affairs, Millersville University, Pennsylvania. . . . pp.335-339.

McEwan, Ian. SATURDAY. Reviewed by Lynne S. Viti, Writing Program, Wellesley College. . . . pp.340-343.

Melville, Herman. BILLY BUDD, SAILOR. Reviewed by Stephen A. Simon, Department of Political Science, University of Richmond. . . . pp.244-247.

Motley, Willard. KNOCK ON ANY DOOR. Reviewed by Walter J. Kendall, III, The John Marshall Law School. . . . pp.348-350.

Rowling, J.K. HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. Reviewed by Bruce Peabody, Department of Social Sciences and History, Fairleigh Dickinson University. . . . pp.351-355.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. Reviewed by Simon Stern, Faculty of Law and Department of English, University of Toronto. . . . pp.356-359.

Twain, Mark. PUDD’NHEAD WILSON AND THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS. Reviewed by Christopher P. Banks, Department of Political Science, Kent State University. . . . pp.360-364.

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. CAT’S CRADLE. Reviewed by Stephen McDougal, Department of Political Science/Public Administration, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. . . . pp.365-369.

Warren, Robert Penn. ALL THE KING’S MEN. Reviewed by Susan McWilliams, Department of Politics, Pomona College. . . . pp.370-372.

Wolfe, Tom. THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. Reviewed by David Schultz, Graduate School of Management, Hamline University. . . . pp.373-375.

Posted by Daniel J. Solove at 10:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Positional Concerns in the Big Apple

Are those who are concerned about inequality really members of the "radical malcontent left?" Turns out that some of our most prosperous citizens are also affected. As David Lat at Above the Law notes, some lawyers in NYC are tired of being vastly outclassed earnings-wise by bankers--and may be happy to see a Wall Street meltdown. Lat wonders if "lawyers [will] move up a notch or two in the Gotham caste system thanks to the recession?" The NYT reports on "fantasies of New York returning to a pre-Gilded Age, before the average Manhattan apartment cost $1.4 million, SAT tutors charged $500 an hour and dinner entrees crossed the $40 threshold."

It may seem absurd to take this kind of "relative deprivation" seriously. Nevertheless, we may be hard-wired to object to economic arrangements that grant some people vastly more than they appear to deserve--even if everyone generally is doing all right. Here's some evidence for that proposition, which a perceptive commenter made earlier to me:

[H]uman behavior is not solely driven by material outcome; fairness and equity matter as well. In a recent neuroimaging study, fair offers led to higher happiness ratings and increased activity in several reward regions of the brain compared with unfair offers of equal monetary value. Other neuroimaging studies have similarly shown activation in reward regions in response to cooperative partners or cooperative play.

I'm not a huge fan of brain studies, but I just offer this up for anyone who is. As Geraldine Fabrikant has reported, even the rich feel some resentment when the super-rich leave them in the dust.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 07:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Reverse Robin Hood: The $30 Billion Question

Remember the controversies over the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) last fall? The Bush Administration was very concerned that spending an additional $30 billion over the next five years to cover more children would put the country on the road to "socialized medicine." Even if economic reports indicated that only one in five families in the coverage expansion would drop private insurance to purchase government sponsored insurance, that was seen as far too high a cost to pay to allow even a bit more publicly-financed insurance to "pollute" children's health care.

Yet the administration has recently endorsed the Fed's $30 billion guarantee for JP Morgan as it purchases Bear Sterns. I'll let the accountants figure out exactly how much of that money will end up being provided by taxpayers, but I think it's safe to assume that more guarantees like this are coming, and that the market itself priced it in in response to the toxic subprime securities Bear still counts as "assets."

So what are the practical consequences when a country allows millions of kids to go uninsured, but structures financial regulation so that leaders of banking firms face nearly no downside, and high upside, on extraordinarily risky investment strategies? It appears that we only worry about moral hazard in the health care arena (where it has been largely discredited), and not in the financial world (where it has been amply confirmed). Internationally, the US is looking less like a leader in financial innovation and more like a haven for crony capitalism. The New York Times describes the situation as "socialized compensation" for the connected:

Bankers operate under a system that provides stellar rewards when the investment strategies do well yet puts a floor on their losses when they go bad. They might have to forgo a bonus if investments turn sour. They might even be fired. Their equity might become worthless — or not, if the Fed feels it must step in. But as a rule, they won’t have to return the money they made in the good days when they were making all the crazy bets that eventually took their banks down.

The costs of such a lopsided system of incentives are by now clear. Better regulation of mortgage markets would help avoid repeating current excesses. But more fundamental correctives are needed to curb financiers’ appetite for walking a tightrope. Some economists have suggested making their remuneration contingent on the performance of their investments over several years — releasing their compensation gradually.

In a recent hearing questioning the extraordinary gains at top financial firms (for pioneering strategies that now may lead to massive government bailouts), Henry Waxman suggested that current policies may lead to a crisis of faith in the market system:

“There seem to be two economic realities operating in our country today. Most Americans live in a world where economic security is precarious and there are real economic consequences for failure. But our nation’s top executives seem to live by a different set of rules.”

To contexualize Waxman's point, here is Paul Krugman with the back story:

[By the 1990s], Wall Street chafed at regulations that limited risk, but also limited potential profits. And little by little it wriggled free — partly by persuading politicians to relax the rules, but mainly by creating a “shadow banking system” that relied on complex financial arrangements to bypass regulations designed to ensure that banking was safe.

For example, in the old system, savers had federally insured deposits in tightly regulated savings banks, and banks used that money to make home loans. Over time, however, this was partly replaced by a system in which savers put their money in funds that bought asset-backed commercial paper from special investment vehicles that bought collateralized debt obligations created from securitized mortgages — with nary a regulator in sight.

As the years went by, the shadow banking system took over more and more of the banking business, because the unregulated players in this system seemed to offer better deals than conventional banks. Meanwhile, those who worried about the fact that this brave new world of finance lacked a safety net were dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned.

Fortunately, it is now market fundamentalism that can be "dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned."

Finally, I want to provide readers with an extended quote from David Cay Johnston's book Free Lunch, which chronicles the way in which government policies systematically redistribute income regressively. After surveying a panoply of such policies, he sketches their effect on the distribution of income in today's economy:

To appreciate fully how much the fruits of economic growth are, under current government policies, being concentrated in the hands of the few, it is useful to . . . examine the ratio of income growth between different groups over several long periods of time, starting with a comparison between the lower 90 percent, our "vast majority," and the top 1 percent.

Let's consider three eras. The first would be from 1950 to 1975, a quarter century when a rising tide did lift all boats and the nation was transformed into a land of broad prosperity. Setting the second era from 1960 to 1985 allows us to incorporate an early part of the era in which government began changing its policies in ways favored by many of the rich. Finally, it would be good to compare 1980 with 2005, but that will not work mathematically because the ratio would include negative numbers, since the income of the vast majority declined slightly. So instead we will use 1981, a recession year, to compare to 2005. The vast majority's average annual income was $114 higher at the end of those 24 years.

The measure is a ratio. For each additional dollar going to each person in the vast majority, how many went to each of those in the top 1 percent? For 1950 to 1975, the ratio is four dollars more at the top for each dollar going to the vast majority. For 1960 through 1985, the ratio is $17. And for 1981 through 2005, it is almost $5,000.

Dramatic as those numbers are, they understate the concentration of income. Let's now compare income growth for the vast majority with the top 1/100 of 1 percent, those 30,000 Americans at the very top of the income ladder. For 1950 to 1975, the ratio was $36 to one. For 1960 through 1985, it was $459. And for 1981 through 2005, it was $141,000 to the dollar.

It's probably safe to say that all of the executives at Waxman's hearing were in the top 1% at some point (and may well be kept there by capital gains on their current wealth). It's likely that they were in the top one hundredth of one percent during the boom.

When will the ratio of gains between those at the top and the "vast majority" become so great that academic defenders of inequality (like Greg Mankiw) will become concerned? Is a 10,000 to 1 ratio too much? 100,000 to 1? And at what point will conventional economic theory recognize the extraordinary importance of relative position to economic welfare? It's currently clear that inequality of income affects such important goods as education, housing, and access to the political sphere. If the fall of the dollar continues and commodity prices continue rising, more brutal consequences of inequality are sure to come to the fore.

PS: Here is one more reminder, from Thomas Pogge, on why, in an era of increasing inequality, it is very misleading to focus on growth alone in economic policy generally:

Consider what difference such a pro-poor assessment of economic growth would make to an economic planner—in a high-inequality country, say, such as Bolivia. If such a planner focuses on (per capita) GNI, she will ignore the poorest decile who, though they make up 10 percent of the national population, constitute just 0.3 percent of the national economy. One percent more income growth for the poorest decile adds 0.003 percent to national growth—one percent more income growth for the richest decile adds 0.472 percent. But if such a planner assesses her performance in terms of the economic position of the poor, she will realize that substantial improvements in the position of the poor are possible at tiny opportunity cost to the rich.

Perhaps by focusing too much on GNP as a measure of economic well-being, the US has inadvertently prioritized income growth for the richest decile.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 07:24 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

"Poorism"

What happens when global inequality becomes extreme enough to be exotic? One result is "poorism," which brings residents of the developed world to visit slums, favelas, and shantytowns as tourists. Eric Weiner explores the ethical dilemmas:

From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty — and in many ways surprising — slums.

David Fennell, a professor of tourism and environment at Brock University in Ontario [says it] is just another example of tourism’s finding a new niche to exploit. The real purpose, he believes, is to make Westerners feel better about their station in life. “It affirms in my mind how lucky I am — or how unlucky they are,” he said.

Not so fast, proponents of slum tourism say. Ignoring poverty won’t make it go away. “Tourism is one of the few ways that you or I are ever going to understand what poverty means,” said Harold Goodwin, director of the International Center for Responsible Tourism in Leeds, England. “To just kind of turn a blind eye and pretend the poverty doesn’t exist seems to me a very denial of our humanity.”

While the feel-good side of tourism is usefully satirized in Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish, I'm in favor of this type of travel in general. Spending 10 weeks in Lima, Peru the summer after my first year of law school fundamentally changed my view of the world. It's very difficult to have a sense of what living on a dollar a day is like unless one has actually seen a shantytown in person. It certainly helps one understand why "contributing to widening divide between rich and poor" is one of the social sins recently highlighted by the Vatican.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 01:23 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Misery Loves Inequality

Economist Robert H. Frank notes that Congress is finally considering alternatives to GDP as measurements of economic well-being:

This week, Senator Byron Dorgan . . . will hold a hearing exploring whether traditional economic measures like per-capita income accurately capture people’s sense of well-being.

[S]urvey findings [show] that when everyone’s income grows at about the same rate, average levels of happiness remain the same. Yet at any given moment, the pattern is that wealthy people are happier, on average, than poor people. Together, these findings suggest that relative income is a much better predictor of well-being than absolute income.

In the three decades after World War II, the relationship between well-being and income distribution was not a big issue, because incomes were growing at about the same rate for all income groups. Since the mid-1970s, however, income growth has been confined almost entirely to top earners. Changes in per-capita G.D.P., which track only changes in average income, are completely silent about the effects of this shift.

The chart above, from Lane Kenworthy's blog Consider the Evidence, shows the trend graphically.

Of course, many of those at the high end of the scale have brought us extraordinary innovations in the financial markets, as this video explains:

Nevertheless, I hope that the Congressional hearing considers works like Dorff and Ferzan's Miscalculating Welfare, which makes the following points:

We turn to the empirical evidence that legal economists should take fairness concerns seriously. This evidence ranges from the recent happiness research that calls into question the correlation between wealth and happiness, to studies of the capuchin monkey who rejects unequal pay, to cross-cultural results of the ultimatum game. We argue that given the growing body of research revealing that individuals value fairness over their own rational self-interests, it is incumbent on legal economists to take preferences for fairness into account.

Hat Tip: Crooked Timber.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 10:54 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

The Home Finance Arms Race

A growing consensus seems to be emerging that we can borrow and spend our way out of the current subprime mess. The "stimulus package," the Fed's interest rate cuts, and new moves to increase the limit on "jumbo loans" all seem based on this assumption. Given that the U.S. is already racked with debt, I can't quite see the logic here. Moreover, as Harold Meyerson noted recently in Congressional testimony, there's a much simpler explanation for the current housing woes:

The subprime mortgage crisis is fundamentally a crisis of the rising cost of housing while the income of many Americans has flat-lined. As home-building executive Michael Hill pointed out in a Washington Post op-ed column just this Monday, "forty years ago, the median national price of a house was about twice the median household income. In some parts of the country, this ratio was closer to 1 to 1. Twenty years ago, the median home price was about three times income. In the past 10 years, it jumped to four times income." And in most thriving metropolitan areas, Hill adds, the ratio is far higher than that.

Conclusion: If median income in America had continued to increase as it did in the years from 1947 to 1973, when it doubled, we would not be facing the mortgage-market meltdown we are experiencing today. So, too, with credit cards, where default rates are also increasing sharply, reflecting the growing desperation of Americans struggling to pay their bills, and further destabilizing many of our already shaky financial institutions.

If economic policies focus solely on allowing the middle class to borrow more, they may well be setting us up for yet another arms race of housing finance that we can ill afford. Consider, for instance, the effects of inequality in New York City, a bellwether for trends likely to affect more of America:

[I]t’s not just real estate. It’s everything, or near everything, and it’s ratcheted up even more in the last few years. As the value of homes and stocks and salaries has spiked, there’s been a kind of arms race of acquisition that has touched every little facet of our lives. You don’t just go to the store and buy groceries, like a regular person; now you fetishize [them] . . . [at] Union Market, where among other preciously presented items there’s a loaf of raisin-walnut bread that isn’t quite as fresh and delicious as the raisin-walnut bread the Lopezes used to bake. But it is three times as expensive.

Wine. Jacques Torres chocolates. Kiehl’s skin creams. Kids’ clothes! . . . Why do we dress our kids like Johnny Depp and Kate Moss? We’ve all gotten pulled into this slipstream of wealth. We have some friends who have a friend who chartered a jet to fly 50 or so of his closest friends to a Mexican resort to celebrate his birthday last year. There’s no way they can repay that in kind, obviously, but the pressure’s on a little at the next dinner party he comes to, you know what I mean?

This is all tricky to talk about without seeming laughably self-absorbed, and I want you to know that I know how loaded we are, comparatively speaking, and not just loaded in that abstract compared-with-the-developing-world way; we’re loaded compared with most of the people in this city. But that too is part of the problem. You don’t feel connected to anyone, in a way, not to the people who have so much more than you and not to the people who have so much less. Money has stretched us all apart from one another.

Real estate's "two americas" may be proliferating into many more tiered options, but the bottom line is that inequality is eroding social ties (and economic hopes) in many ways. The "cheap money" solution to the housing crisis may be less panacea than poison, leading more people to take on more risk in the hopes that ever-rising housing prices may cushion them financially--and thereby risk major losses if those hopes fail to materialize. The next bubble to pop may be far more painful.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 08:45 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Are Debtors' Prisons Next?

Ah, the perils of unintended consequences. The federal government in the 1990s made direct deposit a default method of paying Social Security and some other benefits. Now "Social Security recipients could now more easily pledge their future checks as collateral for small short-term loans." And the "payday loan" industry has found a lucrative new niche--"volume has climbed to about $48 billion a year from about $13.8 billion in 1999."

Responding to the manifest failures of under-regulated consumer finance markets, many are now claiming that predatory borrowing was a bigger problem than predatory lending. I wonder if they'd find predatory "Ms. [Jennifer] Rumph, whose medical problems include severe asthma and two hip replacements," and who appears to support herself and her children with disability benefits:

After Ms. Rumph fell behind on her payments, Miracle Finance sued her in small-claims court in Abbeville, Ala. Although federal law says creditors can't seize Social Security, disability and veteran's benefits to pay a debt, enforcement of the law is scant, and many Social Security recipients are unaware of their legal rights. Lenders and their debt collectors routinely sue Social Security recipients who fall behind in their payments, and threaten them with criminal prosecution, senior advocates say.

Debtors must go to court to prove their case. Ms. Rumph says she didn't know any of this and was afraid to go to court. Miracle Finance won a $1,500 default judgment in July, and four days later sought a court order requiring Ms. Rumph to appear in person to detail her income and assets.

I suppose some analogue to the "fugitive disentitlement" doctrine might leave hard-liners unmoved by Ms. Rumph's plight. Nevertheless, the payday borrowing boom in general should lead to reconsideration of exactly what the purportedly narrowing "consumption gap" between rich and poor is actually based on.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 07:53 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Recommendation Inflation

Though many law schools have become vigilant about stopping grade inflation, what about "recommendation inflation?" Recommendations can become difficult to write well if one is unaware of the prevalence of superlatives in others' assessments. Consider this observation from an English professor: "The level of praise is so high that any assessment short of 'brilliant' can look tepid. That means that any consideration of a candidate's weakness is probably a kiss of death."

The inflation here is particularly pernicious because simple observations like that can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Though the confidentiality of recommendations is supposed to ensure candor, privacy laws also make it highly unlikely that anyone can ever fully compare what one recommender has written on behalf of a range of applicants.

Lior Strahilevitz has argued that there is "often an essential conflict between information privacy protections and antidiscrimination principles," because "the government can publish previously private information about individuals so as to discourage decisionmakers' reliance on problematic proxies." Reflecting on that proposal, I thought that one solution to recommendation inflation would be to establish a norm among recommendation writers to disclose how many times they called someone "the best student I have taught," "in the top 1% of students," etc.

But I sense that the impulse to quantify & disclose here is probably misplaced. To return to the Chron article I cited at the beginning, perhaps there are some more creative ways out of the problem. Though this style of recommending is directed to humanities graduate students, it could be translated to other fields:

One of our sources made a great comparison between the challenge of writing a letter of reference and the task facing Clarence, the angel in It's a Wonderful Life: "Clarence elucidates the importance of George Bailey's life by showing George what it would have been like if George had never been born. A great letter explains what a field or discipline would have been like if the candidate had never contributed to it, and thereby establishes the candidate's contribution."

Ah, the wisdom of Frank Capra. Perhaps narratives have as much a place as numbers in the assessment of excellence.

Photo Credit: It's a Wonderful Life (George and Clarence).

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

How Much Should a Person Consume?

In the book "Stuffed and Starved," Raj Patel notes the startling incongruity evident in the "simultaneous existence of nearly 1 billion who are malnourished and nearly 1 billion who are overweight." The two groups' disparate ecological footprint explains a lot of this paradox of excess and deprivation. Jared Diamond summarizes the data provocatively:

A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does. . . .The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.

Diamond believes that we can avoid resource shortfalls if basic conservation measures are put in place. He argues that "Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life[;] [f]or example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours." However, a Cato Institute blogger (Randal O'Toole) appears to resist even basic steps to curb American energy consumption. He says "A better prescription would be to let markets work: If we really run short of anything, the price will go up, and people will consume less."

O'Toole neglects to note exactly who will be consuming less, but the answer is sadly familiar. As biofuels become common, an American Hummer's gas guzzling may well be raising prices for staple foods in the poorest parts of the world:

The food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, based on export prices for 60 internationally traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 percent last year. That was on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter. . . Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages.

Though food prices have been rising in the United States, basic staples are becoming truly scarce for some of the world's poorest. As the fungibility of food and fuel advances, the buying power externality strikes again.

Of course, it's not merely "free markets'" fault here; the US needs to get out of the business of subsidizing ethanol and to revisit various conservation and public transportation strategies. Sadly, I doubt people like O'Toole would endorse the publicly financed political campaigns that could help end the former, or the planning efforts and taxes necessary to fund the latter. We can all have some hope that high prices will drive technological development. But, as Bruce Wilder puts it, "stories of 'limitless possibilities'" do not constitute an argument.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 02:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Status Anxiety in the Professions

The most emailed NYT story at the moment is a litany of complaints from doctors and lawyers:

[S]omething is missing, say many doctors, lawyers and career experts: the old sense of purpose, of respect, of living at the center of American society and embodying its definition of “success.”

[P]rofessional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago. “Now we have people trying to start a Facebook or a MySpace. You might be working like a maniac, but it’s going to pay off in status. You’re going to be famous, providing something people are going to know and use all over the world” [says one career guidance professional].

In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward — where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites — some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status[.]

Perhaps a brief swim in the TechCrunch DeadPool could bring these folks out of their quarterlife-style quagmire. For every glittering Mt. Zuckerberg, there's an iceberg of "wanna-be-preneurs" with little more than a business plan and a prayer. Seriously, there are reasons for doctors and lawyers to be glum, but I think they have little to do with the fantasies of early retirement or nonstop creativity the article adumbrates.

First, on a practical level, lawyers may want to consult Steven Keeva's Transforming Practices: Finding Joy and Satisfaction in the Legal Life. I imagine there are similar resources for doctors.

Second, the diversity of doctors and lawyers makes this a "best of times/worst of times" market. Though doctors on average make 2-5 times more than OECD averages, specialists do much better than generalists. And as Bill Henderson has shown, there is a bimodal distribution of lawyer salaries that Cook & Frank's Winner Take All Society likely would have predicted in 1995. Those at the top firms are doing better than ever; those on the bottom have to worry more and more about outsourcing, contract employment, and corporate cost-cutting.

Finally, the political question here is how the professions will respond to this wave of inequality. One individualistic response would be to scramble to attach oneself to the patients/clients that are doing best in the current economy. Boutique medicine, cosmetic surgery, and specialty hospitals all offer opportunities here for doctors. Lawyers will probably have to keep angling for firm jobs, though the entrepreneurial may find inroads as, say, compliance specialists within thriving companies.

Another path points away from individualism and toward a more communitarian approach. Doctors are in the business of saving lives and improving health--how can they get the government to pay them properly so they can expand their services to those who are either un- or inadequately insured? Attorneys might question whether deregulation and limits on lawsuits have gone too far. Both lawyers and doctors may "do well by doing good" if they focus on a frankly redistributive agenda that uses money now reserved for tax cuts for the wealthiest to fund basic medical and legal services.

If they do not, they might see their own political position further erode in the midst of skepticism about restrictions on entry into these professions. Consider Dean Baker's argument:

[We now] allow[] many less-skilled workers into the country to fill jobs at lower wages than employers would be forced to pay the native born population. While allowing immigrant workers into the country can be seen as part of the free market, like allowing imported goods into the country, this is only half of the picture. The. . . state puts on strict controls to limit the extent to which doctors, lawyers, economists, journalists, and other highly paid professionals must face foreign competition. [Thus] not everyone’s labor is placed in international competition. Those at the top of the wage ladder get to enjoy protected labor markets. This both raises their wages and means that everyone else must pay more money for their services.

The key justification for a "privileged" position for the medical and legal professions is that they work to provide the entire community with health and justice. If that spirit of noblesse oblige withers, it's hard to see why its legal underpinnings should persist.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 01:22 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

What's Wrong With A Company Paying for a CEO's Family to Fly?

Michelle Leder, of Footnoted, was on NPR's Marketplace yesterday. The story: the worst examples of agency-costs in footnotes in SEC filings in 2007. (She doesn't sell it that way, but that's what it is.)

Bloggers have highlighted a few of Michelle's "best" finds, including Edward Mueller's agreement, as CEO of Quest, to permit his family members to use the company plane to travel back and forth to California (where his family was based) to Denver (where Qwest is headquartered.) Although the story was hyped as permitting Mueller's daughter to commute daily to school -- something of a modern-day Leonard v. Pepsico, there is no evidence that the family plans to fly back and forth in this way.

But who cares anyway? Increasing numbers of high-level executives work far away from home, commuting to headquarters for parts of the week. (The consultants' four day week, but permanently.) Encouraging them to do so maximizes shareholder wealth because it (presumably) allows recruitment of talent that wants to live elsewhere. Now the problem with these schemes is that it is taxing for the executive and her/his home life to be separated from the family. As Professor Joan Heminway explains here, personal turmoil in a CEO's life can have materially adverse consequences for shareholder value, and well-run companies probably ought to do everything they can to make executives personally happy.

So why not pay for a family to commute back to California, to enable a family member to finish her last year of high school surrounded by friends, while coming "home" to Denver when possible? If that makes Mueller happy, and reduces the chance that he would live in California and commute to Denver, Qwest's shareholders win. If the argument is simply that the CEO should pay for this travel out of his own pocket, the flight costs will be imputed as income to him under the agreement, so the economics are basically the same. Given disclosure, these kinds of perks should be seen simply as salary-substitutes, at worst, and as ways to reduce the chance of disruption by increasing the CEO's chance of having a normal family life.

Dailykos (which originally brought the story to my attention) had this to say:

And as this president likes to remind us, this is the ownership society, so don't be surprised to learn that some of your retirement funds are going to fuel up that jet so an execu-kid can zip off to the prom.

But this is plainly silly. Would we prefer that Qwest simply paid Mueller more money? Or not disclosed the behavior?

Posted by Dave Hoffman at 06:56 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The Heroism of Susan Pace Hamill

It is now sadly all too common to see public intellectuals pointedly ignoring--or even cheering on--growing inequality. Bloodless statistical accounts tend to miss the consequences that flow for poor families when taxes on the wealthiest are cut and social programs are gutted accordingly.

Professor Susan Pace Hamill has done an extraordinary job in turning public attention to this problem. According to the NYT's David Cay Johnston, "her latest effort is a book, As Certain as Death (Carolina Academic Press, 2007), that seeks to document how the 50 states, in contravention of her view of biblical injunctions, do more to burden the poor and relieve the rich than vice versa." Some statistics are really striking:

The poorest fifth of Alabama families, with incomes under $13,000, pay state and local taxes that take almost 11 cents out of each dollar. The richest 1 percent, who make $229,000 or more, pay less than 4 cents out of each dollar they earn, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, an advocacy group whose numbers are generally considered trustworthy even by many of its opponents.

As a cursory Google search shows, Professor Pace Hamill has honed her message with extraordinary clarity and skill in a variety of forums--law review articles, books, interviews, and even sermons. Prof. Pace Hamill's engaged scholarship and contributions as a public intellectual provide a great model for those who seek to develop religiously inspired legal theory.

Hat Tip: TaxProfBlog; Mirror of Justice.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 01:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Thoughts on Giving (and a book recommendation)

So it’s Christmas Eve and for many C is for charity and C is for consumerism too. As Frank points out giving can be difficult in part because so many charities have become huge operations and one may wonder whether the money is going to the programs or to the administrative overhead. CNNMoney has a recent article about how to evaluate a charity. It suggests that 75% of the budget should go to its mission (what I call program) leaving 25% for administrative and fundraising costs (yes it costs money to ask for money). The article recommends Give.org and CharityNavigator.org as sites to see how a group uses funds.

Forbes has a survey of the top 200 charities by assets and efficiency. (TIP: use the sort by feature, not the article links. The links go to a useless slideshow. The sort by takes on to the charts.) Here is the efficiency list. Now it may be that some charities are not that efficient but still pretty good. Forbes suggests that 90% is quite possible and that under 70% is suspect. Remember it takes money to attract talent and raise money. Looking for charities with high efficiency is great but some programs require more in staffing to achieve goals. So another way to look at a charity is whether they offer some sort of metrics. Unlike private enterprise the return will not be as easily quantified. Still by setting goals, evaluating them, and seeing where program may need to change, many charities are better able to raise money. For it is easier to give money if one has a sense that someone is at the helm and making sure that the program is working. It may not succeed on each goal but it is focused on understanding why. In addition the idea of social entrepreneurship (see also The New Heroes) which focuses on a problem and tries to find solutions on a large scale uses some of this approach.

Now for a little consumerism. Someone I consider a friend of Concurring Opinions, Patrick S. O’Donnell, often shares excellent insights and further reading suggestions. In one such comment
Patrick mentioned several items for those interested in inequality and development. One of the mentioned authors is Paul Farmer. Although reading Farmer’s work is worth the time, one may desire something a little different from policy this time of year. As such I recommend Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. It details how Dr. Farmer began and continues his impressive work in changing public health systems. So if you want to spend a little holiday money on yourself and want to read a great story that also reveals the problems and some solutions for a major social issue, get the book. I will warn that a friend told me about it, and I hated him for a bit, because I could not put it down and tend to other tasks until I finished.

Ed. Note: Ah yes Frank notes in the comments that one can give to Farmer's cause at this link. Or I find this link easier for giving directly to Partners in Health.

Posted by Deven Desai at 02:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Police on Steroids, Profs on Ritalin

There has been some excellent blawgospheric comment on the Mitchell Report, a Black Sox scandal for our age (see, e.g., Jeff Lipshaw, Howard Wasserman, Michael Dimino and Alfred Yen). My question is: what will be the cultural impact? I think two recent stories on performance enhancement in other fields provide some clues, and suggest the wisdom of the PCBE's worries.

First, the Village Voice has a long story on some possibly inappropriate steroid/HGH use in the NYPD. I say "possibly" for two reasons: 1) the slippery "therapy/enhancement" distinction here and 2) the threat posed by bulked up criminals. The Voice reports that "the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office knows of 29 cops and at least 10 NYPD civilian employees—all well under the age of 60—who have received prescriptions for [steroids for] hypogonadism." Doctors quoted in the story find it implausible that so many officers would have this disorder--but there are probably other physicians who have a much broader concept of disease. And if suspects are bulking up on illegal substances, who can blame the cops for trying to catch up?

The other story is on concentration-enhancing drugs increasingly used not only by students (an old problem), but now by professors. Andrew Sullivan asks, "So if a prof wants to do a little Provigil, it's no worry for me. Why should it be a worry for anyone but the prof himself?" I think there are several reasons, not least the potential for medicalized competition to invade spheres of life we now deem constitutive of our identity. But for now let me just focus on how the police and profs examples intersect.

Think about the balance of scholarship produced in a regime where some labor under the supercharging influence of Provigil, and others forbear. The former will presumably generate more work than the latter. That may be fine in relatively technical fields (who wants to slow down the sequencing of a genome?). But in areas where ideology matters, the potential power of the pill-poppers can be a problem. We need to ask: what are the reasons people are not taking the drugs? A (wise) risk-aversion? A fear of disadvantaging others who can't afford them? A religious concern about "playing God"? And finally, are the people who have all these concerns really the ones we want to be drowned out by super-stimulated, super-productive others?

My basic point here is that Sullivan (and many other libertarians) make an erroneous presumption that the decision to use the drug is wholly distinct from whatever ideology a particular person has. To them, the technology is neutral in itself, and can be freely used (or not used) by anyone. In fact, the drugs fit in very well with certain ideologies and not at all with others. This is an old theme in the philosophy of technology, but is hard to encapsulate in a soundbite (itself a technology far more amenable to some ideologies than others).

At risk of stretching an analogy to the breaking point, I think professors and police face a similarly competitive landscape. The former battle for "mind share," the latter for order. The more we understand the true lesson of Darwin/Dawkins--the pervasiveness of competitive struggle in daily life--the better we can see the need for "arms control agreements" regarding enhancement technologies. (Hopefully they will be more effective than the failed policies of the past.) The question is whether we will permit ourselves to direct evolution or to be the mere products of blind technological forces. Those opting for the latter route make Benjamin's words on the "angel of history" all too prophetic:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

--Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History", cited here.

Photo Credit: Cyborg Flower, jumpinroo.

UPDATE: Bridget Crawford has more insights here. If you're interested in the law, tech, and theory angle, here's a blog/symposium that Gaia Bernstein, Jim Chen, and I put together.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 08:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Understanding Resistance to Redistribution

Over at Balkinization, Professor Brian Tamanaha worries that the "fabled American Dream, the supposed glue that holds our society together across its many fault lines, is a delusion for many." He points to "new research [that] suggests the United States' much-ballyhooed upward mobility is a myth, and one that's slipping further from reality with each new generation." (Even The Economist has recognized the problem!) Tamanaha wonders why the issue has so little visibility in national political debates, and gives several good reasons. I'd like to focus on one of them: the sense that increasing inequality "feels irresistible, the product of structural factors beyond our control."

First, though this sense may be widespread, it is highly contestable empirically, and doesn't really "ring true" at an intuitive level. Let's not even talk about the justice or appropriateness of an executive making hundreds of times more than line workers--what about people who almost got to the top spot? As Eduardo Porter reports, "widening disparities in business, which show up in a variety of other ways, reflect a dynamic that is taking hold across the economy: the growing concentration of wealth and income among a select group at the pinnacle of success, leaving many others with similar talents and experience well behind."

A form of "legitimation theodicy" has become important for some at the top, who reach for sports metaphors:

[Some] very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of themselves as having a flair for business not unlike Derek Jeter’s “unique talent” for baseball, as Leo J. Hindery Jr. put it. “I think there are people, including myself at certain times in my career,” Mr. Hindery said, “who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.”

The flip side of this is a well-cultivated sense among the "losers" in the new economic order that their fates are their own fault. This is one reason why the SCHIP battle is so hard-fought right now: it is very important for those pursuing an inequality-enhancing agenda to insist that some people do not deserve health insurance. . . . and that that sin is so egregious as to be visited even upon their children.

I do not expect redistributional issues to get much play in the upcoming presidential election, for a number of reasons. The media is largely run by those who benefit from the current order. Moreover, no candidate has much reason to offend the what Professor Spencer Overton has aptly called the "donor class." As he noted in 2004,

Less than one percent of the U.S. population makes financial contributions over $200 to federal candidates, and these contributions represent the vast majority of funds that candidates receive from individuals. Of those who contribute over $200, approximately 85 percent have household incomes of $100,000 or more, 70 percent are male, and 96 percent are white. This donor class effectively determines which candidates possess the resources to run viable campaigns.

Thomas and Mary Edsall’s work has detailed the ways in which federal officials’ reliance on large donors has slowly narrowed the range of acceptable political discourse. To the extent politicians are reliant on the support of those enriched by market forces, they are reluctant to interfere too much with the distribution of social power such forces generate.

So what is to be done? First, those concerned about equality of opportunity have to become more skilled at relating the objective harms arising out of inequality. Robert Frank has become a master at this, and I'm going to try to draw out the implications of his work in an upcoming review of his book Falling Behind: How Inequality Harms the Middle Class.

Second, consider the following comment from Greg Mankiw on health care debates:

What health reform would you favor if the reform were required to be distribution-neutral? That is, you can change the rules of the health system but you cannot change the distribution of economic resources between rich and poor.

The bottom line of health care reform has to be an insistence that its financing rely not merely on redistribution from the healthy to the sick, but also from the rich to the rest. A just society is committed to the universal destination of human goods--especially those essential to the preservation of human life. Perhaps we will eventually reach a point at which taxation of those at the top to provide for the care of those at the bottom truly threatens the well-being of our economy. But when "the increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceed[s] the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans," we're a long way from that point on the Laffer Curve.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 11:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Posner: Show Me the Money (and Little Else)

Many scholars are interested in new ways of measuring well-being that go beyond crude measures of income. I have thought of the UN Human Development Index as a good step in this direction, but Richard Posner has come out against it.

I agree with Posner's critique of commensurability implicit in such a ranking, and his points about the distortions that can be caused by the "bunching" of many countries around one indicator. But if there are going to be rankings by income, I would think he would welcome alternative perspectives. Instead, he frets that the US loses out in the UNHDI because its life expectancy figures are lower than many other countries. I found this section of his critique troubling:

If a country devotes resources to improving life expectancy, it has to give up some other good. It is hard to say that the United States is making a mistake in not spending more resources on extending life expectancy; many Americans think that we spend too much on health care already. One reason (though by no means the only one) that the United States ranks only 44th in life expectancy is that our large black population has an abnormally high death rate; the average life expectancy of black male Americans is only 69. This shockingly high death rate reflects deep-seated problems of American blacks that would probably cost an enormous amount of money to solve. The political will to expend those resources does not exist. This may be a misfortune, a tragedy, or even a sin, but to use it to push the United States down in an index of human development is a political judgment, rather than anything determined by neutral social science.

Query: is the UN constrained to measure well-being only via neutral social science? Is that even possible? Well-being and development are inherently normative concepts. Their capacity to reflect a society's "misfortunes, tragedies, or sins" is a feature, not a bug.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 06:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Bargain Men

Wealth watcher Robert Frank presented some survey data on "marriage for money" in the WSJ last week. Willingness to marry for money was surprisingly widespread, but the question's tactful wording casts some doubt on the data:

According to a survey by Prince & Associates, a Connecticut-based wealth-research firm, the average "price" that men and women demand to marry for money these days is $1.5 million. The survey polled 1,134 people nationwide with incomes ranging between $30,000 to $60,000 (squarely in the median range for nationwide incomes). The survey asked: "How willing are you to marry an average-looking person that you liked, if they had money?"

The question really gets at how much of a difference there is between a) an "average-looking" person and the respondent's ideal match, and b) "like" and "love". . . and since we don't know if some respondents imputed the latter into the former, it's not that useful. But I'll give Prince & Associates credit for limiting the survey to people in a narrow income band--I've argued elsewhere that such "willingness to accept" figures are meaningless otherwise.

They also came up with this provocative nugget of data:

Asked how much a potential spouse would need to have to be money-marriage material, women in their 20s said $2.5 million. The going rate fell to $1.1 million for women in their 30s, and rose again to $2.2 million for women in their 40s. Ms. Smock and Russ Alan Prince, Prince & Associate's founder, both attribute the fluctuation to the assumption that thirty-something women feel more pressure to get married than women in their 20s, so they are willing to lower the price. By their 40s, women are more comfortable being independent, so they're willing to hold out for more cash.

Men have cheaper requirements. In the Prince survey, their asking price overall was $1.2 million, with men in their 20s asking $1 million and men in their 40s asking $1.4 million. . . . No one in the survey quoted a price of more than $3 million. . . . . Douglas Freeman, a tax and estates attorney in California who works with wealthy families, says the men's numbers are lower because they would feel threatened by women worth several million dollars.

Though I find Freeman's projections of monetary machismo unconvincing, this story on "dating down" offers some anecdotal support for his point of view.

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 10:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

How the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Uninsured

Two of the most perceptive health policy analysts, Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, provide a good "reality check" for those who think a Massachusetts-style health plan can fully handle the problem of the uninsured. (Though it took me a long time to figure out their title, "I am not a Health Reform," was a play on Nixon's "I am not a Crook.")

Woolhandler and Himmelstein observe that the past twenty years of failed state-based health care reform (and mandates) do not bode well for the plans now being discussed among presidential candidates:

In 1971, President Nixon sought to forestall single-payer national health insurance by proposing an alternative. He wanted to combine a mandate, which would require that employers cover their workers, with a Medicaid-like program for poor families, which all Americans would be able to join by paying sliding-scale premiums based on their income.

Nixon’s plan, though never passed, refuses to stay dead. Now Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all propose Nixon-like reforms. Their plans resemble measures that were passed and then failed in several states over the past two decades.

W&H are particularly disappointed by the recent Massachusetts plan; "even under threat of fines, only 7 percent of the 244,000 uninsured people in the state who are required to buy unsubsidized coverage had signed up by Dec. 1. Few can afford the sky-high premiums." W&H should also acknowledge that in some cases the uninsured themselves are responsible; according to one recent study, "twenty-five percent are eligible for public coverage."

W&H suggest that mandates will not work, but do not have the space to fully explore why. I think they are right to emphasize lack of affordability in plans, but a recent book suggests some deeper issues. Charles Karelis's The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor argues that we cannot expect impoverished individuals to react to economic incentives the same way that middle- and upper-class people do.

Karelis asks a provocative question: "what if the choices that truly benefit typical human beings when they're poor are working little and not saving?" He asks us to consider the following scenarios:

In the first, a poor worker with no car or bus fare must walk six miles to work. And let's say this long walk results in six blisters, and six unwashed dishes in the sink at home, and workplace mistakes that bring six reprimands from the boss. Suppose too that getting a bus ride for part of the way would reduce the worker's troubles proportionately, so that each mile she didn't have to walk would mean one fewer blister, unwashed dish, and reprimand. What will the poor worker give up to get a one-mile ride, given that she still has five miles to walk? Probably not much. After all, the sixth blister, unwashed dish, and reprimand tends to be drowned out, like a shout in a riot, by the other five anyway.

But now imagine she has just been given a five-mile bus ride, free. She has only one mile left to walk. What will she give up to get a one-mile ride now? Probably much more than in the first scenario because the difference between the discomfort of one blister, unwashed dish, and reprimand and the discomfort of none is far greater than the difference in discomfort between six and five. If the effect of getting a one-mile bus ride in the first scenario is like that of quieting a shout in a riot, in this scenario the effect of the one-mile bus ride is like that of quieting a shout in an otherwise quiet street.

Karelis offers a number of other examples in a phenomenology of the poor that challenges conventional economic wisdom. If we think of health insurance payments as a form of (probabilistic) saving, we can better understand how many of the uninsured rationally choose to persist in vulnerability. Life is already pretty bad presently; why deny certain small pleasures (or necessities) now to improve an uncertain future?

Of course, we all grow up with Horatio Alger tales, and there are many inspiring microlending success stories out there. But capitalism's chutes and ladders have a dark side, too. Perhaps it's time policymakers stopped trying to scare the poor into certain patterns of behavior--fill out this form, pay this deductible, etc., or you don't get health insurance!--and instead take this particular "blister" of insecurity off the table.

Karelis is a philosopher, and though some may challenge his introspective methods, I can say that coming from a family that often had little money, they often made a lot of sense to me. The more policymakers can meld the insights of a Karelis with empirical works like Sudhir Venkatesh's Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Poor, the better a chance we have at addressing the persistent disadvantages and insecurity generated by the great risk shift. Here are some closing thoughts from Karelis:

[W]e should reopen the welfare debate that preoccupied liberal and conservative poverty reformers during the 90s. Having agreed that giving poor people resources undermines their motivation for self-help, the liberal and conservative camps fell to wrangling over whether generosity or maintaining incentives ought to be the top priority. (The liberals lost.) But the choice between generosity and maintaining incentives is a false one if generosity actually enhances the motivation for work and investment — by increasing the relief that poor people stand to get from the next dollar. It's time to take another look at no-strings welfare for the truly poor. . . .

Posted by Frank Pasquale at 10:01 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Verkuil and Klein on Privatization

Philip Dynia at the Law & Politics Book Review has commented on Paul Verkuil's Outsourcing Sovereignty: Why Privatization of Government Functions Threatens Democracy and What We Can Do about It. Dynia characterizes the book as a sober and penetrating analysis of two disturbing trends:

Who is really in charge of government policy making? Verkuil sets himself the task of demonstrating two points: (1) that important work both significant to and often inherent in the concept of government is being contracted out to the detriment of democratic policy making, and (2) that the trend can (and though he does not say so directly must) be moderated, if not reversed, by changes in the way government operates.

Dynia calls Verkuil's "command of the relevant literature . . . prodigious," and notes his skill at "incorporat[ing] constitutional, statutory, administrative, and contractual sources." Here are some of the conclusions that Dynia draws from Verkuil's book:

[T]he ratio of political appointees to the number of senior career managers must change. Verkuil cites a report by the National Commission on the Public Service (the Volcker Commission) which notes that President Kennedy had 286 political leadership positions to fill, President Clinton 914, and President George W. Bush 3,361. Such a large number of political appointees paralyzes government . . . . Moreover, studies have shown that politically appointed bureau chiefs get systematically lower management grades than bureau chiefs drawn from the civil service . . . . In short, FEMA’s Michael Brown . . . is just the pathetically obvious tip of [an iceberg of] cronies.

I look forward to comparing Verkuil's book to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, a polemical take on privatization.

Writing in Harper's, Klein makes the following observations about two potential responses to increasing risks in society:

There will be more Katrinas. The bones of our states--so frail and aging--will keep getting buffeted by storms both climatic and political. And as key pieces of the infrastructure are knocked out, there is no guarantee that they will be repaired or rebuilt, at least not as they were before. More likely, they will be left to rot, with the well-off withdrawing into gated communities, their needs met by private