Complex Terrain Laboratory is hosting an online discussion next week on PW Singer’s new book on robotics and war, Wired for War (starting Monday, March 30). Singer is participating and, having read his opening post, it looks to be fascinating. It is a terrific lineup of participants, including yours truly. Check it out!
(Given the recent Obama administration review of the Predator campaign in Pakistan, I thought it would be a useful thing to put this discussion on the table. Welcome Instapunditeers, and thanks Glenn for the Instalanche! You might also want to check out the ComplexTerrainLab's discussion among academics of PW Singer's Wired for War, here.)
Why targeted killing? And why the insistence that it will increase in utility as it is partnered with high-technology, stand-off platforms such as Predator drone aircraft? Why the emphasis on targeted killings and robotics? There is a fundamental strategic rationale lying behind the policy trend.
The United States has found the limits of how extensively it can wage full-scale wars with its military; even if wanted to take on more wars, it has logistical and political limits. In addition, the United States has discovered that full-on war is useful principally against regimes. Full scale, large scale war of the kind waged in Afghanistan and Iraq is useful primarily for bringing down a regime that, for example, might harbor or support terrorists, or which might be believed to be willing to supply terrorists with materials for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Full-scale war has a crucial strategic place in national counterterrorism policy, but by its nature that role is about states and regimes fundamentally.
Large-scale military operations are less useful directly against transnational terrorists, however, who are few in number, dispersed across populations and often borders, disinclined to fight direct battles, and more efficiently targeted through narrower means. The fundamental role of war in counterterrorism is to eliminate the regimes that provide safe haven to terrorist groups; terrorist groups can be strategically understood as an extreme version of a guerrilla organization engaged in a strategy of logistical raiding – in which civilian morale and resulting manipulation of political will is the logistical target. Logistical raiders typically need a safe base to which to retreat, and full-scale war is most useful in eliminating such safe bases and convincing other regimes not to provide them. But it is not usually an efficient way of going directly after transnational terrorist groups themselves.
Law enforcement utilized outside the United States, on the other hand, has also discovered its outer limits. Many debates are still to be had over the rights of alleged terrorists once in U.S. custody. Even so, whatever they are, few would argue that going out to ‘arrest’ terrorists in, for example, Pakistan’s tribal zones is a winning policy or a serious option. The same is true in Somalia and other places, and it will be true in other places in the world in the future.
Moreover, the political costs for any U.S. administration taking and holding detainees are now enormous. Once you hold them, over time they will likely be accorded quasi-Constitutional protections by the courts, at least some version of habeas corpus. Politically, the most powerful institutional incentive today is to kill rather than capture them. The intelligence losses of killing rather than capturing in order to interrogate them are great. But since the U.S. political and legal situation has made interrogation a questionable activity anyway, there is little reason to seek to capture rather than kill. And if one intends to kill, the incentive is to do so from a standoff position, because it removes messy questions of surrender.
All this speaks to the advantages to the U.S. government of targeted killing of terrorists or persons seriously believed to be terrorists, and it also speaks to the advantages to the US government from using stand-off robotics technology to perform these attacks. But the humanitarian advantages of ‘targeted’ killing are enormously important as well, and ought to be on the table. This is particularly so given that targeted killing has come in for a barrage of criticism, legal and ethical, much of which seems motivated by the fact that it can be more discriminate than full scale military assault; the fear seems to be that it makes violence too easy to undertake. The same criticism is offered of the evolution of robotic technology that increasingly allows targeted uses of force without having to risk one’s own personnel. Not using one’s own personnel allows a party to attack without the fear of counterassault that might increase the need to use greater amounts of force and cause greater collateral damage – but it also, so it is sometimes argued, thereby reduces the inhibitions on the decision to use force.
Why this should be a downside for US strategic counterterrorism policy is not entirely evident, but clearly some critics are disturbed by it. Much of the criticism amounts to a very contemporary restatement, aimed against the targeted killing that evolving robotic and surveillance technology might permit, of a very old argument against the idea itself of the introduction of humanitarian standards in conflict (one that stretches back at least to the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)), that humanitarian standards by their promulgation would reduce the disincentives to war.
Whatever the critics say, however, is unlikely to sway US strategic policy, under the Obama administration or anyone else subsequently. The humanitarian benefits of precision targeting are far more obvious than the more remote and abstract suppositions of their humanitarian costs. Their direct policy consequence is to introduce greater discrimination in targeting than full-scale military assault and large-scale war permit, through targeted killing using high technology. There is a clear humanitarian advantage favoring the use of targeted killing over full-scale war. Advancing technology allows for more discrete surveillance and therefore more precise targeting that is finally better able to minimize collateral civilian damage.
The result is a strategic incentive for targeted killing, for Predator strikes, and for increasing the quality of technology to make targeted killings both more precision targeted and more standoff. Precision targeting and standoff delivery are each independently desirable and, in combination, considerably increase the incentive. The Obama policy team did not quite run on a policy of targeted killing – but it did run on a policy of taking the fight to Al-Qaeda in Pakistan in a targeted way.
The Obama administration is right about this – right about the logic that presses toward targeting standoff killing as a necessary and available and technologically advancing part of counterterrorism. It is also right about it as a moral and humanitarian proposition in the law and policy of the use of force. It is a conclusion that is correct as well as for foreseeable future administrations, even if administrations naturally prefer to couch it in softer terms.
None of this alters the equally impeccable strategic logic underlying the use of law enforcement mechanisms in some circumstances. Nor does it alter the logic behind other forms of intelligence activities such as surveillance or financial interdiction, or even the use of open, full-on war. The strategic logic for toppling a regime in pursuit of counterterrorism during the next ten or twelve years can by no means be ruled out. But these are not disjunctive policies. They all can and should work together. But targeted killing is likely to increase as a policy preference as full-scale wars decreases in number and intensity.
The paradox, however, is that although the strategic logic for targeted killing increases in persuasiveness, the legal space for it and the legal rationales on which it has been traditionally justified are shrinking. It has been shrinking in ways that might surprise members of Congress and the Obama administration. And it is at risk of shrinking still further through seemingly innocuous, unrelated legal policy actions that the Obama administration or Congress might be inclined to take in support of various political constituencies, usually related to broadly admirable goals of human rights and international law.
U.S. law, in domestic law since the original Cold War legislation establishing the CIA in 1947 at least, and in the US view of international law, accepts a legal, political, and policy space for the use of violence by political decision not in the course of large scale, open armed conflict governed by international humanitarian law, and not in the course of judicially supervised law enforcement operations, either. ‘Violence by political decision’, in peacetime outside of open armed conflict under international humanitarian law, was a space of activity accepted and considered vital to national security throughout the long decades of the Cold War. Only in certain narrow times and places was the decades-long conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies a ‘hot’ war, open and large-scale armed conflict, clashes of armies. Political violence in the Cold War was often covert, often denied, but it was authorized and endorsed by US domestic law, although it was frequently a violation of the law of states where such activity took place and unsurprisingly was sometimes, too, a source of grave diplomatic and other friction.
This category of force is an obvious means by which to confront non-state transnational terrorists outside the territorial United States. It is especially true outside the territory of states where effective mechanisms exist for arrest, detention, investigation, trial, and punishment, or alternatively extradition, of suspected terrorists. Regimes that have allied themselves to terrorist organizations – the Taliban in Afghanistan – might be toppled. Failed states might require large-scale military action in order to block the use of territory as a safe haven by terrorist groups. But as a strategic matter, actual attack on a physically small number of terrorists embedded among civilians is often best served by attacks made as physically precise and discrete as surveillance and targeting technology allow.
Interesting discussion tonight in my financial crisis class on compensation systems on Wall Street, and the misalignment of incentives short term and long term.
The fundamental misalignment of interests in compensation in the financial firms is that a two fold misalignment:
First, the players think of themselves as free agents, and their annual bonuses as performance-based awards for how well they did that year. But although they think of their bonuses as performance based, the fact that it is based around performance in a single year means that it does not reflect the true economic performance of their work. We won’t actually know that for some time to come, as the bets made that year pay off or not down the road.
Second, therefore, the compensation paid to the players is not really performance based, as though to free agent independent contractors being paid for their performance. It is compensation for labor, even if highly skilled labor, but not different in principle from that of other employees. How do we conclude this? Because although the actual performance of the trades, bets, and other actions will not be known for years to come, the players have been compensated now, this year - and there is no clawback arrangement in case it turns out that it all goes bad. That’s how an employee paid for his or her labor is treated - yes, there is a performance component, but if performance of an employee is poor, he or she is terminated now, no one demands that he or she return the past five years of salary. That is one misalignment - players think of themselves as compensated as free agents but in fact the timing indicates they are compensated as employees.
The second misalignment is that players are compensated in timing as employees - they are paid now and there is no clawback for bad bets. But while the timing of compensation is as for employees, the amount is as though they were equity participants, taking risks themselves and not merely as agents for the firm. The players get the best of both worlds - timing as mere employees selling their labor but amount as though they had their own money at risk, when in fact they don’t. (The fact that poor performance means getting fired or no bonus this year isn’t different in principle from other employees - to make it different, you’d have to claw back past pay because it didn’t pay off.) But the best of both worlds is bad on a welfare basis and bad for the firms, if the firms ever have to worry about the bets paying off beyond the relevant compensation year.
Althouse finds true love. Actually, I want to say congratulations to Althouse’s beloved, for having pursued and wooed and won Professor Althouse via quite possibly the most unlikely vehicle for true love on the planet ... the comment thread. Wow!
The world longs for an agreeable America. America longs to be agreeable. Why not, after all? After the hardness and harshness of the Bush years, you are either with us or against us, our war against terrorism is the measure of all things, the closed fist of military power and the open, greedy, grasping palm of the global reserve currency, ready to take, the rest of the world wants an America that goes on a Listening Tour. And America today is eager to listen, is she not? Smart diplomacy, reboot, reset, and above all re-engage, with friends, allies, enemies, anyone who wants to talk. We are the new multilateralists and the UN is a good place to show it.
This essay has addressed throughout the strategic ambiguity of multilateralism, its ability to be, on the one hand, the device of coordination, even highly robust coordination, among sovereigns. But also how different the meaning of multilateralism, on the other, if it is imagined as a forward-looking, expectation-based vanguard-party for genuine global governance through liberal institutions of law that presumably will transcend mere international power politics. But multilateralism can also exhibit another form of strategic ambiguity – this one particularly focused upon the hegemon, the superpower, the hyperpower, the dominant power that has … grown tired of its calling, lasse de son métier.
What happens when the hegemon decides that it wants to turn inward? What becomes a hyperpower most, when it decides that the parlous state of its domestic economy – despite being intimately intertwined with nearly all of the global economy – requires that it put the issues of the previous eight years, foreign policy and war, terrorism and counterterrorism, issues of the global order, on hold, and focus itself upon its domestic policy and politics? How best to put that decision to the rest of the world?
America has enemies who would rejoice if the US were to forsake its role as provider of hegemonic order. It also has friends and allies who would be glad to embrace a ‘multilateral’ America – not realizing that America has something else in mind, or perhaps realizing it, but still on multilateral-autopilot. But where is Aron? Where is Raymond Aron? Or for that matter, De Gaulle? What would they say? You can trust an America that is mostly about its interests, a little about its ideals, even if you have to denounce it sometimes as a unilateralist in order to keep it and you in the game; you can trust an America that undiplomatically, rudely even, declares its interests and its ideals, puts them first, and invites others to go along with it; multilateralism is great if it means you can have some influence on the plans of America, but only if you can still trust that America plans to carry out its plans because they’re still its rather than yours. An America that suddenly wants to work the hardest, most intractable, hard-realism problems through the UN? What is this? An America that believes that the multilateral processes of the Security Council are the right way to pursue foreign policy because those processes treat the US as just another of the big boys in the world? The biggest, sure, indispensable, even, if you want to play the flatterer, but that’s neither here nor there – hey, we’re just another player in the game, everybody, even if we’re big or even the biggest, hey, we’re just another player. What would Aron say to that?
It is, after all, what the UN theorists always saw as the proper role for America – all that marvelous power, hard and soft, at the disposal of global institutions, the power of a mighty sovereign infused into and transformed by the legitimacy of an international institution, a global constitutional order with teeth at long last. It is a beautiful dream, power and legitimacy that equal authority. But, just as with Nato, it does not work that way. No. Friends, allies, even countries that do not much like the US but rely on it for a certain amount of order, both economic and security: be wary, O world, of an America that promises a smiling multilateralism.
Perhaps it is sincere. But perhaps it is not. Is the uncertainty killing you yet? But we’re all multilateralists now, we mean our global promises, just like you – don’t you? Perhaps America has grown tired of its global responsibilities and just wants a good night kiss from its friends and allies and then a good rest, though what this might mean in a competitive, multipolar, rising-new-power, increasingly mercantilist-with-nukes world, who can know, but maybe we’re willing to give it a try. Perhaps it has decided to really join the legitimate global system of the UN and embrace governance through multilateral institutions after all, and perhaps it has decided, too, that it is less effort to do what others do, multilateralism as others do it, to engage in insincere promises and toss hard things to the UN, to the Security Council, to institutions that will allow America to focus on its fiscal problems and unemployment and education and health care and social security: the President is available for speeches in the larger foreign capitals, particularly those holding large amounts of US Treasury debt, and anyway, he already did Berlin, watch it on Youtube, but as for Iranian nukes and North Korean missiles, Russian expansionism and natural gas blackmail, Chinese protection for Sudan in the Security Council and the always-present question of war in the Taiwan straits, the collapse of Eastern European economies, Mexico-the-narco-failed-state and the rise of Britain-exporter-of-global-jihad, and the ever-imminent war between India and Pakistan that constantly risks, against all our multilateral hopes and dreams, reversion to its six-decade mean, well, remember, we’re multilateralists now, and the US is a good global player, a team player in the big leagues of multilateralism, and if the US acted like a bully, wouldn’t everyone just hate us, and haven’t we had enough of the hate?
America just wants to be loved and henceforth we will measure the success of our foreign policy according to the Gallup global polls that so fascinate our media, foreign policy experts, and Department of State. It’s empirical! And also – if it’s not too much to ask – America wants not to have too much to do with anyone else, except on a strictly commercial and, okay, okay, sometimes charitable, do-gooding basis. Got that part? We’ve got our own problems and our own issues, if you haven’t noticed. We’ve realized multilateralism is good for that, though not necessarily the way you thought: we plan, by the way, to be multilateralists just like you. We’ll even pay over our .7% GDP for development, and to the corruptniks, rent-seeking kleptocrats at the UN, no less, because frankly it’s easier to send the check to one address than try and keep all those Africans alive on retrovirals that need constant attention, constant organization, constant management, constant unilateral care – but then will you just fuck off and leave us alone to figure out our new social-democratic tax system? You asked all those years why the United States couldn’t be more like Sweden. Or maybe it was Holland or Finland or Denmark or Luxembourg or Andorra. Well, we can, we can, we can be a well-run little social democratic welfare state of modest multilateral mien, and a real joiner at the UN, too, inchallah, a member of the Human Rights Council, proud multilateral sponsor of Durban III, IV, and V, and maybe even see an American as President of the General Assembly someday, a good multilateral day, if we pay enough attention to us and stop paying so much attention to you.
(This is a bit of a manuscript on UN-UN relations I’ve been working on that won’t survive the editing cut, because even I will find it too cute, so I thought I’d stick it up here so that it won’t get lost forever. The book, in which I assure you these passages will not appear, is titled Returning to Earth: Abiding Principles of Relations Between the United States and the United Nations, for the Obama Administration and Beyond, from Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming 2009 inchallah.)
Jose Guardia, of Barcepundit, posts in memoriam for the victims of the Madrid Atocha train station bombing, five years on. My family and I were living in Spain when it occurred; my views on it were aired in a Weekly Standard article. Here to the memory of those who died and my continuing sympathy to their families.
Eva Belén Abad Quijada, española, 30 años
Óscar Abril Alegre, español, 19 años
Liliana Guillermina Acero Ushiña, ecuatoriana, 26 años
Florencio Aguado Rojano, español, 60 años
Juan Alberto Alonso Rodríguez, español, 38 años
María Joséfa Alvarez González, española, 48 años
Juan Carlos Del Amo Aguado, español, 28 años
Andriyan Asenov Andrianov, búlgaro, 22 años
María Nuria Aparicio Somolinos, española, 40 años
Alberto Arenas Barroso, español, 24 años
Neil Hebe Astocondor Masgo, peruano, 34 años
Ana Isabel Avila Jiménez, española, 43 años
Miguel Ángel Badajoz Cano, español, 34 años
Susana Ballesteros Ibarra, española, 42 años
Francisco Javier Barahona Imedio, español, 34 años
Gonzalo Barajas Díaz, español, 32 años
Gloria Inés Bedoya, colombiana, 40 años
Sanaa Ben Salah Imadaquan, española hija de marroquíes, 13 años
Esteban Martín De Benito Caboblanco, español, 39 años
Rodolfo Benito Samaniego, español, 27 años
Anka Valeria Bodea, rumana, 26 años
Livia Bogdan, rumana, 27 años
Florencio Brasero Murga, español, 50 años
Trinidad Bravo Segovia, española, 40 años
Alina Maria Bryk, polaca, 39 años
Stefan Budai, rumano, 37 años
Tibor Budi, rumano, 37 años
María Pilar Cabrejas Burillo, española, 37 años
Rodrigo Cabrero Pérez, español, 20 años
Milagros Calvo García, española, 39 años
Sonia Cano Campos, española, 24 años
Alicia Cano Martínez, española, 63 años
José María Carrilero Baeza, español, 39 años
Álvaro Carrion Franco, español, 17 años
Francisco Javier Casas Torresano, español, 28 años
Cipriano Castillo Muñoz, español, 55 años
María Inmaculada Castillo Sevillano, española, 39 años
Sara Centenera Montalvo, española, 19 años
Oswaldo Manuel Cisneros Villacís, ecuatoriano, 34 años
Eugenia María Ciudad-Real Díaz, española, 26 años
Jacqueline Contreras Ortiz, peruana, 22 años
María Soledad Contreras Sánchez, española, 51 años
María Paz Criado Pleiter, española, 52 años
Nicoleta Diac, rumana, 27 años
Beatriz Díaz Hernandez, española, 30 años
Georgeta Gabriela Dima, rumana, 35 años
Tinka Dimitrova Paunova, búlgara, 31 años
Kalina Dimitrova Vasileva, búlgara, 31 años
Sam Djoco, senegalés, 42 años
María Dolores Durán Santiago, española, 34 años
Osama El Amrati, marroquí, 23 años
Sara Encinas Soriano, española, 26 años
Carlos Marino Fernández Dávila, peruano, 39 años
María Fernández del Amo, española, 25 años
Rex Ferrer Reynado, filipino, 20 años
Héctor Manuel Figueroa Bravo, chileno, 33 años
Julia Frutos Rosique, española, 44 años
María Dolores Fuentes Fernández, española, 29 años
José Gallardo Olmo, español, 33 años
José Raúl Gallego Triguero, español, 39 años
María Pilar Gamiz Torres, española, 40 años
Abel García Alfageme, español, 27 años
Juan Luis García Arnaiz, español, 17 años
Beatriz García Fernández, española, 27 años
María de las Nieves García García-Moñino, española, 46 años
Enrique García González, dominicano, 28 años
Cristina Aurelia García Martínez, española, 34 años
Carlos Alberto García Presa, español, 24 años
José García Sánchez, español, 45 años
José María García Sánchez, español, 47 años
Javier Garrote Plaza, español, 26 años
Petrica Geneva, rumana, 34 años
Ana Isabel Gil Pérez, española, 29 años
Óscar Gómez Gudiña, español, 24 años
Felix González Gago, español, 52 años
Ángelica González García, española, 19 años
Teresa González Grande, española, 38 años
Elías González Roque, español, 30 años
Juan Miguel Gracia García, español, 53 años
Javier Guerrero Cabrera, español, 25 años
Berta María Gutiérrez García, española, 39 años
Sergio de las Heras Correa, español, 29 años
Pedro Hermida Martín, español, 51 años
Alejandra Iglesias López, española, 28 años
Mohamed Itaiben, marroquí, 27 años
Pablo Izquierdo Asanza, español, 42 años
María Teresa Jaro Narrillos, española, 32 años
Oleksandr Kladkovoy, ucraniano, 56 años
Laura Isabel Laforga Bajón, española, 28 años
María Victoria León Moyano, española, 30 años
María Carmen Lominchar Alonso, española, 34 años
Myriam López Díaz, española, 31 años
María Carmen López Pardo, española, 50 años
María Cristina López Ramos, española, 38 años
José María López-Menchero Moraga, español, 44 años
Miguel de Luna Ocaña, español, 36 años
María Jesús Macías Rodríguez, española, 30 años
Francisco Javier Mancebo Záforas, español, 38 años
Ángel Manzano Pérez, ecuatoriano, 42 años
Vicente Marín Chiva, español, 37 años
Antonio Marín Mora, español, 43 años
Begoña Martín Baeza, española, 25 años
Ana Martín Fernández, española, 43 años
Luis Andrés Martín Pacheco, español, 54 años
María Pilar Martín Rejas, española, 50 años
Alois Martinas, rumano, 27 años
Carmen Mónica Martínez Rodríguez, española, 31 años
Míriam Melguizo Martínez, española, 28 años
Javier Mengíbar Jiménez, español, 43 años
Álvaro de Miguel Jiménez, español, 26 años
Michael Mitchell Rodríguez, cubano, 28 años
Stefan Modol, rumano, 45 años
Segundo Víctor Mopocita Mopocita, ecuatoriano, 37 años
Encarnación Mora Donoso, española, 64 años
María Teresa Mora Valero, española, 37 años
Julita Moral García, española, 53 años
Francisco Moreno Aragonés, español, 56 años
José Ramón Moreno Isarch, español, 37 años
Eugenio Moreno Santiago, español, 56 años
Juan Pablo Moris Crespo, español, 32 años
Juan Muñoz Lara, español, 33 años
Francisco José Narváez de la Rosa, español, 28 años
Mariana Negru, rumana, 40 años
Ismael Nogales Guerrero, español, 31 años
Inés Novellón Martínez, española, 30 años
Miguel Ángel Orgaz Orgaz, español, 34 años
Ángel Pardillos Checa, español, 62 años
Sonia Parrondo Antón, española, 28 años
Juan Francisco Pastor Férez, español, 51 años
Daniel Paz Manjón, español, 20 años
Josefa Pedraza Pino, española, 41 años
Miryam Pedraza Rivero, española, 25 años
Roberto Pellicari Lopezosa, español, 31 años
María del Pilar Pérez Mateo, española, 28 años
Felipe Pinel Alonso, español, 51 años
Martha Scarlett Plasencia Hernandez, dominicana, 27 años
Elena Ples, rumana, 33 años
María Luisa Polo Remartinez, española, 50 años
Ionut Popa, rumano, 23 años
Emilian Popescu, rumano, 44 años
Miguel Ángel Prieto Humanes, español, 37 años
Francisco Antonio Quesada Bueno, español, 44 años
John Jairo Ramírez Bedoya, colombiano, 37 años
Laura Ramos Lozano, hondureña, 37 años
Miguel Reyes Mateos, español, 37 años
Marta del Río Menéndez, española, 40 años
Nuria del Río Menéndez, española, 38 años
Jorge Rodríguez Casanova, español, 22 años
Luis Rodríguez Castell, español, 40 años
María de la Soledad Rodríguez de la Torre, española, 42 años
Ángel Luis Rodríguez Rodríguez, español, 34 años
Francisco Javier Rodríguez Sánchez, español, 52 años
Ambrosio Rogado Escribano, español, 56 años
Cristina Romero Sánchez, española, 34 años
Patricia Rzaca, polaca, 7 meses
Wieslaw Rzaca, polaco, 34 años
Antonio Sabalete Sánchez, español, 36 años
Sergio Sánchez López, español, 17 años
María Isabel Sánchez Mamajón, española, 37 años
Juan Antonio Sánchez Quispe, peruano, 45 años
Balbina Sánchez-Dehesa Francés, española, 47 años
David Santamaría García, español, 23 años
Sergio dos Santos Silva, brasileño, 28 años
Juan Carlos Sanz Morales, español, 33 años
Eduardo Sanz Pérez, español, 31 años
Guillermo Senent Pallarola, español, 23 años
Miguel Antonio Serrano Lastra, español, 28 años
Rafael Serrano López, español, 66 años
Paula Mihaela Sfeatcu, rumana, 27 años
Federico Miguel Sierra Serón, español, 37 años
Domnino Simón González, español, 45 años
María Susana Soler Iniesta, española, 46 años
Carlos Soto Arranz, español, 34 años
Mariya Ivanova Staykova, búlgara, 38 años
Marion Cintia Subervielle, francesa, 30 años
Alexandru Horatiu Suciu, rumano, 18 años
Danuta Teresa Szpila, polaca, 28 años
José Luis Tenesaca Betancourt, ecuatoriano, 17 años
Iris Toribio Pascual, española, 20 años
Neil Torres Mendoza, ecuatoriano, 38 años
Carlos Tortosa García, español, 31 años
María Teresa Tudanca Hernández, española, 49 años
Jesús Utrilla Escribano, español, 44 años
José Miguel Valderrama López, español, 25 años
Saúl Valdez Ruiz, hondureño, 44 años
Mercedes Vega Mingo, española, 45 años
David Vilela Fernández, español, 23 años
Juan Ramón Zamora Gutiérrez, español, 29 años
Yaroslav Zojniuk, ucraniano, 48 años
Csaba Olimpiu Zsigovski, rumana, 26 años
The NYT Room for Debate blog is kind enough occasionally to invite me to contribute on law topics. We recently had a mini-debate on the question of whether Congress should empanel some kind of “truth commission” to deal with issues of torture and other things from the Bush administration. I was the voice in opposition. Other contributors were David Cole, Michael Ratner, Margaret Satterthwaite, and Jenny Martinez. A good time had by all, etc. - it’s a good short summary of the arguments.
It generated a lot of comments - several thousand rather than the usual several hundred - from Times readers around the country. If there was anything that surprised me in the comments, it was the number that simply said, the economy is too urgent, it’s time to move on and deal with what’s in front of us. I was also struck by how relatively few people commenting seemed to understand that any discussion of the Bush administration’s policies would inevitably require discussion of senior congressional Democrats who were all briefed on detention, interrogation, and rendition policies. Commentators seemed largely unaware of the Congressional oversight role.
The Room for Debate blog is a good forum for discussion, by the way - thoughtful, very well-edited, many fun topics across a wide range of issues.
(Cross-posted from Opinio Juris.)
One of my students composed the following haikus based, he said, on a lecture last week in my financial crisis course ...
Stress from the crisis
Causes my hair to fall out
We will form a gang.
Then, in connection with a point I had made in class that, when we talk about “falling dominos” when successive counterparties fail in cases of systemic risk, it isn’t simply that institutions fall in a single chain - the ripples extend outwards, not just in a single line of dominos, but in multiple directions, like a network:
Systemic Risk is
Not like dominoes, it is
Not that linear.
Then, in trying to find ever-weirder metaphors to explain systemic risk, I appealed to The Puppet Masters, the classic sci-fi novel by Robert Heinlein, where the aliens communicate by “merging” to “share information” as a single body - hence, in trying to kill the parasite, virus would spread from one t the next as though it were a single organism; the act of communicating would spread the virus.
However, since no one had read the book or seen the movie, I shifted craftily to another sci-fi reference of networks spreading infections - the Borg!:
Virus infecting
One Borg drone can destroy all
That's Systemic Risk.
Expansion and leverage take place on the basis of assets; contraction and de-leveraging, however, take place by institution and market. The process is relatively smooth and incremental in expansion, but sticky and punctuated in contraction as institutions fail. The asymmetry is a function of the legal regime. Is the asymmetry correctly priced by the financial markets in assets and by the markets in institutional control? I wonder.
(Other pressing engagements restrict me from saying more about this topic now, but I plan to turn and write something, at least as an introduction, later in 2009. It seems to me a quite important perspective in the current legal, economic, policy, and intellectual environment of the financial crisis, and one that has not so far emerged in its own right. I might make some unannounced revisions to this at some moment, as it mostly constitutes notes to myself. I’m afraid I buried the lede, though, and don’t have time to correct it now - sorry! - the important stuff is halfway in and then to the end.)
As economics absorbs psychology and expands to create behavioral economics (the intersection of actual behavior and posited rational behavior), it will inevitably wind up having to address a third large area. This third area has sometimes been called ‘moral psychology’ - the study of moral concepts that have to do with the emotional and affective propensities, capacities, and behaviors of human beings. Perhaps not really a discipline, it partakes partly of philosophy of mind and moral philosophy, insofar as it is about elucidating the meanings and concepts of affective states, including the virtues but also including crucial concepts of human psychology, such as trust, friendship, love, hate, and many more. It also partakes, for obvious reasons, of psychology - and yet psychology, because of the disruptions to the discipline of the past fifty years (starting with the collapse of Freudianism), has had difficulty taking part as it sorts its methodologies out.
Can I give any concrete examples of moral psychologists? The writers in moral philosophy who have analyzed the virtues have, to one extent or another, almost of necessity written to some extent in moral psychology - Philippa Foot, for example, or many writers in virtue ethics, notably Rosalind Hursthouse. It also includes writers in virtue ethics and law - Larry Solum, who many of us know for his Legal Theory Blog and as a jurisprudentialist and theorist of intellectual property, is, in my humble view, most important in the long term for his work on virtue ethics and judging. But moral psychology has also included, for reasons also obvious, writers on the morality of punishment, forgiveness, praise and blame, desert, thankfulness, and so on. Some of the most important - the great philosopher of morality, famous for his work on punishment, Herbert Morris, has written extensively on philosophy and psychoanalysis and Freud, and who continues to teach at UCLA on the moral emotions. The link among all these is the willingness to look not merely at actions and acts, but at the interior subjective state as a source and matter of morality, upon affect and affection, that necessarily require a view of mind, emotion, and feeling.
Lawyers and law professors have long shown great propensity for moral psychology - in the distinctions of intentionality in the criminal law, for example, or distinguishing between kinds of performative utterances, and so forth. Taking a book not-quite at random from my shelf, Ian Ayres’, et al., Insincere Promises (Yale 2005). Although you might have thought it would begin with a disquisition on rationality, promising-and-defection games (important, of course), instead it begins with a fastidiously subtle discussion of promising as a performative act, a rigorous linguistic account of mental states in promising sincerely and insincerely. Lawyers are good at moral psychology. To some degree, however, in the infatuation of academic law with rationality games of economics, moral psychology has been devalued as, well ... the humanities.
Affective moral psychology has been au courant for at least a generation now in academic moral philosophy; nothing new there. Behavioral economics is quickly coming into its own. Two things seem to me to have gone unremarked, however, each of which deserves far greater attention.
One is that this rising field of behavioral economics stands in need of far greater attention to and from moral psychology - specifically from philosophers who, trained in the careful distinguishing of moral concepts but also attuned to affect, are able to disentangle such concepts crucial to the new disciplines, but frankly not carefully thought out, such as trust.
I will return to ‘trust’ in a moment. But first note that this attention from philosophers is different from another kind of attention that seems to flow in fits and starts across successive academic generations - the philosophy of economics more generally, meaning by that mostly the philosophical concepts of value and comparison. The philosophy of economics (the field I would be most inclined to study in philosophy and intellectual history were I starting all over) has had some great contributions in recent decades - Elizabeth Anderson, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Cass Sunstein (particularly his contributions on incommensurables and on analogical reasoning). Yet it tends to stop and start over the long term. We need more discussion of these core concepts in economics, more attention from philosophers, not less - but I mean something much more specific in referring to moral psychology: philosophy of economics only sometimes addresses itself to questions of affect.
Rising awareness of the specificity of finance, and the role of such things as passions, greed and fear, virtue and vice, rationality and irrationality - naturally these are the first subjects for the new behavioral economics and behavioral finance. But notice how quickly these subjects turn to topics in moral psychology. The great finance economist Robert Schiller, for example, had an opinion piece, drawn out of a new book, in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago (WSJ, Opinion Page, January 27, 2009) that specifically asserted ‘trust’ as a condition of financial markets. Yet it was striking how undeeply conceived the concept of trust was in the essay - it was nothing more than ‘confidence’ in one’s fellow participants.
Whereas the essay seemed to rely upon a quite different idea than merely mutual confidence giving rise to animal spirits, in Keynes’ famous term. It seemed to rely not on trust in one’s fellow market players, but instead the much more psychologically and philosophically nuanced idea that in a society governed by the neutral rule of law, while one might need a certain amount of mutual confidence in the willingness at one point or another in the business cycle to take risks, one did not need to have any great trust in one’s fellow market participants, but instead trust in a set of public institutions to enforce agreed upon relationships between otherwise not-greatly-trusting participants in markets. This is, after all, what separates out public trust societies from cousin-loyalty societies - and the implications of wherein you place your trust have enormous implications for what and how you regulate in order to maintain that necessary trust. If one stops to parse the concepts, trust involves a mutuality, or assumption of mutuality, that confidence need not - it might, as my reference to ‘mutual confidence’ suggests, but it need not. Trust is psychologically and conceptually - evidenced in the nuances for how we use the terms, which is to say, partly as synonyms but partly not - deeper and more inherently ‘mutual’ than confidence: these apparently minor or subtle differences have considerable implications, perhaps surprisingly, for what Schiller’s essay might propose to regulate or not, as a matter of public policy.
This is a small example, of course, and one that does not especially deal with affective aspects of trust - but it is illustrative of the general problem that finance economists have not necessarily thought all that deeply about affective concepts, let alone how an affective, interior, intersubjective concept like trust can be distinguished from other closely related, and yet different (and with different implications, sometimes very large, for how to regulate) concepts in moral psychology - or operationalized as testable propositions in empirical behavioral economics. I would guess that Professor Schiller has probably not read Francis Fukuyama’s under-appreciated book on precisely this subject - and a very fine work of moral psychology by a non-philosopher - Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.
The second unremarked thing follows closely on this. It is that finance, in particular, stands in special need of dialogue with moral psychology. Why finance more than economics generally? It is because finance, and finance theorists, are discovering with astonishing rapidity in the dislocations of markets today that markets do not always follow impersonal rules of economic rationality - there are limits upon efficient markets (I say this as a believer, not a revisionist), there are empirical behavioral tendencies that can undermine markets that regulation needs to take into account - and there are important conceptual issues about empirical behavior that need to be understood even in the real-world act of establishing regulation. Trust is a good example - if you think that trust in financial markets is mostly about trust in your fellow participants, as even Greenspan seemed to suggest in his latest Congressional testimony, then you will have one view about regulation. If you think it is about trust in the neutrality of public institutions leading to the enforcement of contrast irrespective of the identity or propensity or affect of other market participants, then you will have a quite different view of regulation. The conceptualization of what is at bottom a concept, a concept with feet planted in multiple disciplines, but ethics and psychology being two of them - that conceptualization really matters. It matters in particular in finance.
Why finance, then? Because in many other parts of economics, the operation of brute self-interest or else the truly impersonal operation of institutions is sufficient to establish and ordain behavior. You don’t need to reach deeply into psychological, let alone moral, concepts, provided (typically) that the law is sufficient to enforce external rules. Finance, by contrast, to the degree that that economists such as Schiller are themselves today asserting that the nature of markets permitting mass participation by individuals, and not just by impersonal institutions, invokes the psychology of both individuals and masses (that is, without saying more about it, both psychology and sociology - sociology, that is, and not merely psychology, in such matters as legitimation of public institutions such as financial markets), then finance is different. It is different in part because of the different role of psychology - and concepts that rely upon affect and upon concepts and understanding of moral affect, greed and fear, virtue and vice, reward and punishment, praise and blame, shame and guilt, anxiety and relief, euphoria and melancholy, animal spirits and animal passivity, affection and disaffection. Those are especially present in mass market finance, as the behavioral economists well know today - but that betokens a far closer examination of the underlying concepts and their meaning. This is a job for moral psychology.
And so ... the moral psychology of finance. Perhaps even a new, and slightly different field ... virtue economics? Why not?
(I see from comments that some people are taking ‘virtue economics’ to mean ‘economics as influenced by distributive morality’ - that field is already highly worked out, and I intend something different here. By ‘virtue economics’, I mean not questions of distributive justice, but instead the conceptual meanings, distinctions, and elucidation of psychological states, emotions, feelings, and affect, as they interact with economics and financial economics particularly.)
I don’t have time at this point to say more. But if we were going further, we might turn to consider not just moral psychology and finance, but also sociology and finance. It is not irrelevant to say that with respect to public financial markets, there is a certain kind of legitimation crisis underway. That is a concept alien these days not just to the economists, but in large part even to the political scientists. But, really, how is one to understand the problem of trust or confidence in public markets in which one invests one’s life savings without a deep concept of ... legitimacy?
I was asked by a friend the other day about my (evolving) views of transnational governmental regulatory networks - the kind of networks championed by Anne-Marie Slaughter, for example, in her book A New World Order. In my lengthy review of that book, I criticized such networks as seeking to “square the circle” of global governance - global governance without actual global governance. I think that critique is correct, but I also think I should be clearer about the virtues of such networks - provided that they limit themselves in important ways.
There are problems with such networks from an accountability and transparency standpoint. The recent, very good SMU conference I attended back in November had a talk by someone who had been part of such a network that dealt with certain banking issues, and she thought the network great - until she became an academic and tried to study it and discovered that no one would so much as talk to her, let alone show her documents that, indeed, had important implications for policy.
But accountability and democratic legitimacy have become somewhat confused in the literature on networks, governmental and NGO advocacy networks. They are, after all, separate things and separate political/moral values. You can have democratic legitimacy and yet have very poor accountability mechanisms. And you can have excellent accountability mechanisms, yet not through democratic mechanisms, but instead through legally enforceable governance standards, courts of law, efficient bureaucratic oversight, etc. So saying that intergovernmental regulatory networks of the kind praised in A New World Order often lack transparency or accountability is important, but it is not always, and not always most importantly, because of a lack of democratic legitimacy. The question of democratic legitimacy is there independently. So is the question of accountability. (I discuss this in an upcoming review essay in the American Journal of International Law, reviewing a book, NGO Accountability - I think it will be the January 2009 AJIL, but AJIL is a bit backlogged.)
Nonetheless, insofar as these regulatory networks are limited to doing what they are able to do under the grant of bureaucratic - usually executive - authority within their own (democratic - which raises a separate problem) states, I do not have a problem as such with their democratic legitimacy. There might be problems with their regulatory reach, and this might be magnified in a transnational setting with less transparency. But in principle, I do not see this as very different from the fact that national agencies might have similar overreach and democratic deficit problems.
Notice how admirably conciliatory I am being today of these networks. And that is important to stress, because I do indeed see them as having a genuinely legitimate role, within certain bounds, for precisely the reasons their advocates have said. By contrast with the NGOs, they are able to partake of the (we hope) democratic legitimacy of their national governments. But to do that, however, requires that they act within the terms of that national legitimacy.
That last condition limits them to a coordinating function. It might be very robust coordinating function - meaning one in which the several members exercise great pressure to keep players 'in the game' and to prevent defection from a collective action system. But it is still a coordination among sovereign states, in which, if one is willing to pay the price in reputation, future dealings, etc., there is no fundamental legal mechanism to prevent a member from departing the system. If Lincoln aptly defined sovereignty as "a political community, without a political superior," then a coordinating group of sovereigns must accept that it is not a true ‘partnership’, with the power to prevent departures. On the other hand, the group can offer collective benefits to offset the burdens.
This then leads to what seems to me the fundamental problem with these networks. It is not the networks as such - it is what they are imagined to be in a certain liberal internationalist imagination, including how they are praised in A New World Order. It is the fundamental idea that over time, as a matter of simply history taking its (and what I would call its Whig History) course, governance within networks, and among networks, will "densify" until they coalesce into something that is more than just coordinated networks of various bureaucratic functions. Over time, these mechanisms will solidify into true networks of governance.
Now, I am highly skeptical of that as an empirical historical proposition about the future. But I am equally skeptical of it as a moral/political proposition, precisely on grounds of democratic legitimacy. And on this matter of morals, I suppose I also part company with the "new sovereigntists," at least in their 1990s original form. In that original form, the emphasis was on sovereignty, essentially for its own sake and own value. My emphasis - and I believe that people like Jack Goldsmith and Jeremy Rabkin have come my way in the last decade - is not on sovereignty as such, but on democracy and democratic legitimacy, for which sovereignty provides a crucial vessel for its defense. It is not sovereignty as such I wish to defend; it is democracy and (liberal, that is, including the rule of law, fundamental individual rights, etc.) democratic societies, for which sovereignty is a means of its defense, not the thing to be defended as such.
I understand that if one is a true liberal internationalist, you cannot really be satisfied with resting upon coordinated transnational actors; you want true global governance. And it is natural to want to see these things as growing into that governance. I also cannot over-stress how much I admire A New World Order for being willing to say flatly that NGOs cannot offer that legitimacy, only governments can. (The NGO advocates and their intellectual defenders have moved to a kind of weirdly obscurantist position of calling for "norm entrepreneurship" as a vehicle for eventual governance, but that is mostly a way of eliding the legitimacy question.)
But I do not accept that one can make the jump from coordination to governance without sacrificing the principle of democratic legitimacy. The effect of this, in today's world, is that it is an argument not so much over the existence of transnational regulatory governmental networks today, but rather over what they might become in the future. It is mostly an argument about anticipations and hopes for the future. However, if you are committed to them becoming all these wonderful political things in the future, you might well wind up ruining them and their narrow, bureaucratic functioning within a narrow, bureaucratic mandate today. Why? Because imagining their expanded political role in future governance leads to overplaying the narrowly regulatory role which gives them a certain legitimacy today precisely because they are perceived as narrow in activity and ambition. Alter that perception, and you raise significant legitimacy issues for the activities they might carry out today reasonably successfully.
I was invited to participate in one of the New York Times’s group blog discussions, Room for Debate, this one on Guantanamo detainee policy. It is a pretty interesting group of discussants - David Cole, Andy McCarthy, Ben Wittes, Diane Amann, Deborah Colson, Glenn Sulmasy, and me - and the posts are quite substantive.
(So now I feel a little bad about all those mean things I said about the NYT in earlier posts here. Sort of. Well, not so much. Actually, my analysis of the Times’s business model is still right.)
(I am cross-posting this from Opinio Juris.)
I am unclear as to one thing in the Executive Order issued by President Obama regarding interrogation practices. The text of the Executive Order is here. It provides that the CIA must conform to the Army manual with respect to interrogation techniques, but says (bold-face added):
That was very nice of Larry Solum to post a mention of my new paper, The Assumptions Behind the Assumptions in the War on Terror, on the Very Great Legal Theory Blog. Even nicer of him to call it highly recommended! Alas, I’m not so sure I highly recommend it, though. I picked an easy target and then scattered shots all over the place. There are some important things in there, but I don’t think it’s the best organized or written thing I’ve done.
But I think the topic is hugely important, and I plan to pursue it in a series of articles or some kind of venue.
One perhaps overlooked part of the article, however, is the comparison of cost benefit analysis comparisons in private business settings versus public governmental settings. As the article notes, in the private firm setting, the comparisons are automatically self-constraining - meaning that you don’t wind up comparing completely wacko things, or in other words, private firms automatically tend to limit their comparisons to things that are in some real sense comparable - because they have no special obligation or necessity to be involved in any particular line of business.
Government, on the other hand, doesn’t have that luxury - it must be involved in radically different forms of comparison because it has to be involved in the provision of things that involve different and plural values. The mechanisms of comparison developed for private firms, however, tend to be developed - NPV, etc. - within a constrained universe of things to be evaluated and compared, in a way that is not true of public institutions. This isn’t exactly news, of course; public management theory has recognized this difference between it and private firm management decision theory for a long, long time. But I don’t see the distinction showing up so much in the law and economics literature as I would have thought.
This is one of those observations that tends naturally to occur to someone like me, of that small subset of people who do both finance law and national security and public international law. There is something peculiar, at least to a finance professor like me, to seeing a technique that has a routine, less than transcendental meaning within the world of private business, ratcheted up to be a kind of philosophical talisman to be applied to, well, everything. Tools like NPV have meaning - says this finance law professor - only within bounded universes in which something else sets the terms of what can be meaningfully compared. NPV depends upon exterior concepts of meaning; it does not generate them itself.
I have just posted a new article up to SSRN: The Assumptions Behind the Assumptions in the War on Terror: Risk Assessment as an Example of Foundational Disagreement in Counterterrorism Policy, 54 Wayne Law Review 5505-535 (2008).
Here is the abstract posted to SSRN:This 2007 article (based around an invited conference talk at Wayne State in early 2007) addresses risk assessment and cost benefit analysis as mechanisms in counterterrorism policy. It argues that although policy is often best pursued by agreeing to set aside deep foundational differences, in order to obtain a strategic plan for an activity such as counterterrorism, foundational differences must be addressed in order that policy not merely devolve into a policy minimalism that is always and damagingly tactical, never strategic, in order to avoid domestic democratic political conflict.
I don’t think this is the smartest piece I’ve ever written, alas. I’m treating it as the first draft of a larger, but important, project on the limits of cost benefit analysis. Mueller is popular, in all the vulgar bad senses of the word, and in that sense an easy target. But the vulgarity of Mueller’s analysis has certain advantages, in that it makes every conceivable mistake, openly and notoriously. But I think much of the critique also applies even to much more cautious formulations of CBA as the driver of policy in responding to terrorism. Here is the conclusion, by the way, slightly rewritten to stand alone, as something I shared with the Hoover Task Force last week:
The article takes risk assessment in counterterrorism, using cost benefit analysis, as an example of a foundational disagreement that cannot easily be elided. Examining an extreme, indeed crude, recent example of cost benefit analysis applied to the risks of terror and the costs of counterterrorism - John Mueller's widely noticed Overblown - the article suggests that cost benefit analysis, at least applied in this way, runs roughshod over other important values in counterterrorism policy, such as justice, but in addition, makes radical yet unstated assumptions about what cost benefit analysis seeks to compare in establishing counterterrorism policy or estimating the risks and costs of terrorism - unstated assumptions that, in fact, assume the conclusion.
The article notes that cost benefit analysis tends to promote a policy-minimalizing "event specific catastrophism" - seeking above all to prevent simply the next, serial terrorist attack, with however no greater strategic vision. Indeed, the article says in conclusion (as Philip Bobbitt has noted) cost benefit analysis is "relentlessly tactical," not strategic; it also tends toward serial 'event specific catastrophism' as its analytic frame; and it is a method of evaluating proposed courses of action, not generating them, and hence promotes a strategically questionable tendency to reaction as a response to terrorism.
This article presents these ideas in brief fashion, however, as the first draft in a larger project on cost benefit analysis and counterterrorism, and it does so by reference to a book that is unabashedly crude in its approach to both cost benefit analysis and terrorism/counterterrorism. The critical project will extend beyond this particular article, which is in effective a a first pass at developing a critique. It is also an article that does not extend beyond events of early 2007 (when the original address was given) and should be read in that light.
Kenneth Anderson, The Assumptions Behind the Assumptions in the War on Terror: Risk Assessment as an Example of Foundational Disagreement in Counterterrorism Policy
(Wayne Law Review, 2008)
(Slightly modified conclusion from the not-final draft galleys.)
V. CONCLUSION: OF STRATEGY AND TACTICS
This essay has made five over-arching points.
First, US responses to terrorism—whether one calls it generically
counterterrorism policy or a war on terror or anything else—depend on
certain underlying assumptions, what this essay has called the
‘assumptions behind the assumptions’ in counterterrorism. Cost benefit
analysis is a core ‘assumption behind the assumptions’ lying below the
surface of operational counterterrorism policy.
Second, cost benefit analysis itself depends upon further
assumptions. These further assumptions have a large impact on the
otherwise apparently straight-forward comparative approach to weighing
up policy options in the face of risk and uncertainty. These further
assumptions embedded, but not necessarily transparent, within cost
benefit analysis include, among others, the difficulties in ensuring that
the analysis compares apples-to-apples or oranges-to-oranges. In a social
and political world of multiple and plural values, this is far more difficult
than it would be, for example, in the case of financial analysis in the
private marketplace, where, at least in principle, comparisons can be
reduced to the common denominator of money. Not all values in our
social world can be reduced to a common denominator.
Third, although cost benefit analysis can provide important data
for making moral judgments about such fraught matters as how to
respond to terrorism, it does not finish the moral discussion—at least not
for most people in American society. Beyond whatever advice cost
benefit analysis might give, most people are ‘permissive deontologists’
when it comes to matters of how to respond to purposive and intentional
actions such as murder and terrorism. For the same reason—justice—we
devote far greater resources to the pursuit of criminals than cost benefit
analysis might plausibly justify, we are also inclined to devote more
resources to responding to and preventing terrorism. Arguments from a
cost benefit analysis that suggest that we devote too many resources to
counterterrorism would also apply with equal force to the argument that
we allocate too many resources to the criminal justice system for the
pursuit of ordinary criminals.
Fourth, similar observations about the overreaching tendency of cost benefit
analysis, under an apparently simple exterior, can be made with respect
to ‘commensurability.’ As noted earlier in the essay, this is a point
closely related to, but still different from, the observation that we, as a
society, embrace plural values that are not reducible to one common
denominator. cost benefit analysis relies upon the comparison of
‘opportunity costs,’ but the comparison of opportunity costs depends
upon them being genuinely available ‘opportunities’—social choices that
might genuinely be made. Whether an opportunity is genuinely an
opportunity in our existing social world or not is a question of social fact
about the world. Arguments from cost benefit analysis that rely upon
opportunity cost comparisons involving socially or politically
implausible opportunities—opportunities from another, alternative
world, so to speak, not our real one—are of much less importance than
their conclusions might seem. Again, such arguments overreach.
This essay has focused on the writings of one particular analyst, John
Mueller, and his book Overblown, as an example of the deeply flawed
use of cost benefit analysis. It is a more than fair point to respond that
using Overblown as the case study in the ills of cost benefit analysis is
the worst kind of strawman argument. On the one hand, the book has
been widely noticed, cited, and relied upon for argument by important
journalists and policy analysts, such as journalist James Fallows.62 On
the other hand, serious academic students of cost benefit analysis would
recoil from the sweeping, breezy assertions and conclusions made by the
book, on all the objections raised above and perhaps more. The reason
for making it the target in this essay is not in order to suggest that it
stands in for much more serious cost benefit analysis. It does not.
But, Overblown is illustrative of the basic errors that can and might
arise from failing to take into account the underlying assumptions of cost
benefit analysis—and the illustration is far easier to see in a crude form
of cost benefit analysis, rather than a more careful and hedged version of
it. The point of this essay is not to undermine the case for cost benefit
analysis in responding to terrorism—far from it—but instead to help
define the subtle limits upon the method and the matters that must be
drawn out carefully and explicitly in order to ensure that comparisons are
indeed comparable, particularly with respect to counterterrorism policy.
It is therefore useful to start with a view, claimed on its own terms to be
generated by cost benefit analysis, that America’s approach to terrorism,
far from trying to wipe out its perpetrators or even devote much in the
way of resources to prevent it from taking place, might instead merely
“center around creating the potential to absorb its direct effects,” and
“mitigate its longer range consequences.”63 The very boldness of the
claim, and the fact that the claim reached such radical conclusions
through the application of cost benefit analysis, puts squarely on the table
what the method can do, cannot do, and what assumptions it relies upon.
There are sophisticated and defensible applications of the method to
counterterrorism,64 but as a starting point for considering the method’s
assumptions, sometimes the crudest, least methodologically protected
example provides the most illustrative value (provided that the critic
understands that the baby of cost benefit analysis cannot, therefore, be
thrown out with the bathwater, as it were).
Fifth, one final observation can be made about cost benefit analysis and its
underlying assumptions. It is an observation particularly pertinent to its
application to terrorism and counterterrorism. The nature of cost benefit
analysis is essentially reactive. It is—and this point deserves an essay all
its own with respect to national security and terrorism policy—a method
of evaluation, a mechanism for evaluating proposed courses of action,
not for generating them.65 As a method, it is, in Philip Bobbitt’s phrase,
“relentlessly tactical.”66 Cost benefit analysis does not propose solutions;
it evaluates solutions offered by other processes. It is not a strategic form
of thinking.
The fundamental limitation of cost benefit analysis, in other words,
lies not so much in its own assumptions, but in the limits of what it does and does not do.
The long-term US response to terrorism—counterterrorism policy, the
war on terror, however one wants to frame it—requires a strategic form
of thinking. We will not agree on what the strategy should be, which is
why, as a democracy, we have majoritarian processes to sort out the
agreements and disagreements, and come to a form of action. Cost
benefit analysis can provide indispensable information for arguing over,
and finally formulating, strategic approaches. But it will not come up
with those strategies in the first place. And that, in the end, is its true
limitation.
Like many people, I reread MLK’s ‘I have a dream’ on MLK Day. But today I also reread the Letter from Birmingham Jail. Here is hoping all of you have a peaceful and lovely MLK day. As far as I can tell, things are pretty hopping and jolly down on the Mall here in DC; it seems like a lot of cars and buses have parked up on American University campus in order to take the Metro bus downtown. But all is very quiet out here on the edges of DC in Spring Valley. I don’t have the stamina to deal with either the crowds or the cold on the Mall and am just hanging out at home. The semester is finally beginning for real in the last half of this week, or at least that’s how it seems. Everyone have a good holiday.
I wonder if the time has come for the United States to offer political asylum to the Jews of Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe?
(Welcome Instapunditeers! This is a long essay, put up in four successive posts, on the business model of the New York Times and how it can be seen to follow certain parts of Veblen’s theory of the leisure class. An abbreviated version of it was published at Pajamas Media online. This long version goes into more discussion of pricing under conditions of conspicuous consumption and luxury goods.)
The Information Theory of the Leisure Class, or,
A Requiem for my New York Times Home Delivery
I
Is it the politics, or is it the business model, and are they the same thing?
I am about to drop my Washington DC home delivery subscription to the New York Times. We’re going online for free.