"basically shows that as the size of a deadly event grows, its probability declines, but that the expected death-count (probability times size of event) is a constant. " For "shows" read "claims". In general, with Social Science it's wise to be suspicious of constants, inevitabilities, single-factor reductions, straight-line extrapolations, sophisticated models.... and every other goddamn thing about social science.

According to Duby, the random violence described by Gregory was reduced over a period of centuries, first by the Carolingian state and later by the church's "peace of God", until Europe became so peaceful that they couldn't stand it any more and started the Crusades.

"basically shows that as the size of a deadly event grows, its probability declines, but that the expected death-count (probability times size of event) is a constant." For "shows" read "claims". And in general, with social science it is wise to be suspicious of constants, inevitabilities, single-factor reductions, straight-line extrapolations, sophisticated models.... and most of the rest of social science too.

I was going to say, someone should tell Sen. Dodd and the 99 other Senators that to most reasonable people the "greatest deliberative body in the world" seems like a clown show. (HT Atrios).

Jonathan, Sullivan is not anti-Semitic, and Jews can't throw the entire history of anti-Semitism in the face of anyone who happens to cross them in some way. Very few do, but you and Wieseltier are two of them. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

Heebie: The way you increase productivity is by understaffing and then bullying the remaining workers. I've been there.

**The left’s revolt against health care reform represents the other. What has re-emerged in recent weeks is the spirit of the New Left--distrustful of evolutionary change, compromise between business and labor, and the practical tools of progressive reform.** Democrats can't win without strong liberal support but they refuse to make any concessions to liberals. This leads to toxic intraparty relations. To the centrist (the ones who want to work with Republican centrists, who don't exist), the problem is one way -- the bad liberals who fail tro understand thet their job is to volunteer adnd vote every two years, and then shut up. Liberals are strictly politics of consent, and should have nothing to do with the politics of governance. This leads to a permanently weakened party, but centrists like it that way because defeating the liberals is a prime goal. And they're thoroughly entrenched because of graft from special interests, and they may be unbeatable. The government-business partnership, however wise it may have been in 1960, has developed plenty of problems which need to be addressed. The bubble and its collapse is one of them. The huge private insurance rakeoff on health insurance is another. You can't evade these problems with New Left smears forever. Obama recruited a whole new genration of voters and disillusioned therm almost immediately. It's not , or even primarily health care -- there are also two wars and civil liberties questions. Those volunteers were not hoping for what they got. It wasn't liberals who chose to dissipate the momentum by letting Grassley, Enzi, and Snowe play games for months before bringing down the hammer. It wasn't liberals who did everything they could to weaken the bill and prevent its passage. But for Chait it's the same old symmetrical "extremists of the right and of the left problem", because that's the only song he knows. Has anything changed since 1948's "The Vital Center"? For Chait nothing has. There's nothing more to learn. It's all right there.

We need non-market incentives. The Saudi method of summary execution of exemplary individuals, preferably by beheading on the sidewalk right on Wall Street, sounds about right.

It's sort of discouraging when reality turns out to be more cynical than I am. In my various wild speculations and over-the-top satires I have never produced something like this.

Well, both George Will and Alexander Cockburn are in her heritage.

The answer is: "No! Not in a million years! What the fuck were you thinking? For Christ's sake! God damn you to hell!" I'm much more interested in her relationship to her Aunt Tina [of the Talking Heads].

What I said, Theobald, is that America's drift toward militarization and authoritarianism, the present state of which we see in Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, and the interminable War on Terror, can b traced back to the beginning of WWI. We have never demobilized since. As far as I know nothing we did ever saved any Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese, or Cambodian lives. I've granted you WWII.

Samuelson might have mentioned the history of economics' suppression of history. It wasn't a casual oversight.

"12/7".

that the freedom for which we fight is that freedom for all men on which alone permanent peace can be built. Eloquent but unreal. I'm not a 11/7 conspiracy theorist, but the decision to go to war was not made on 11/7. Neutrality would have been possible. Probably it was just inevitable doom. But I am unable to accept the happy-face interpretation.

When we entered WWII, the inevitable militarization was irreversible and destructive. The role of Congress and the electorate on decisions to go to war has always been threatened, and it's smaller by the decade. Remember the insistence after the fall of the USSR that there would be NO peace dividend? Remember the decade before 9/11 when military spending was kept high while our wise heads searched desperately for an enemy? Osama pulled a lot of chestnuts out of the fire. When we switched from the holy war against Fascism allied with Communism to the to the holy war against Communism allied to whatever fascists we could find, there was a demoralizing effect. It's amazing how few interpret Orwell that way -- "we've always been at war with Eastasia." This is not to say that we shouldn't have entered the war. But it put it us on the slippery slope to a multi-decade war on a nebulous enemy which cannot be defeated and cannot surrender, since it's everywhere and nowhere.

I have the same experience as A, even with my new computer. Per the error messages I used to get, it's almost always the Amazon script that hangs it up. Worst site on my web surfing rotation that way.

**The only story that makes sense is that Dubner and Levitt went to Intellectual Ventures, were wowed by their presentations....** The explanation that makes sense to me is that they both believed that there would a lot of money, both royalties and grant money, in denialism porn. Both were probably right.

I'll just repeat my summary of free-market thought: free-marketers are utopian optimists about the market and technoilogical progress, and apocalyptic pessimists about social and political action. Unsurprisingly, many economic models leave out society and government entirely, as if they were epiphenomenal and derivative. Also unsurprisingly, Chicago school economists analyze society and government as though they were markets, most egregiously in Becker on the family, but also in a lot of public choice theory. And still unsurprisingly, a lot of freemarketers wish that government, and to a lesser extent society, didn't exist at all, sicne what they really are is just defective, distorted, inefficient markets. (Though the wiser Chicagoites acknowledge some residual function to these archaic survivals). Though of course, whenever the market fails the state, society, or individual psychology is to blame. (To my knowledge, Chicago school economists do not blame the family for anything, but if more of them were gay or single I bet they would.)

Are you saying that a vegetable-protein diet is in some way inferior to a meat-protein diet even if the amounts of proteins are adequate? Because that's just stupidity. "Are not perfect substitutes" means very little. Perhaps "if you can only eat one thing, it should be meat", but that's an artificial condition almost never found in reality. Do you mean that pound for pound, meat protein is better? Because that may be true, but it's of very peripheral importance.

There are various easily-attained mixes of plant proteins that are adequate substitutes for animal protein. "Perfect" is a red herring here -- there's no perfect food or perfect diet. Vegetable protein, at its best, is as good as animal protein at its best. The one exclusively animal product necessary for health is B12. A sitrict vegan diet can be unhealthy for that reason.

OK, then, it's not change they fear. It's the present reality, which they compare to a mostly-imaginary past which they want to bring back. Many of them want to abolish Social Security, which is 75 years old -- few people even remember the pre-Social Security era. They also don't fear technological progress, or changes in economic organization favoring big business and wealthholders.

**Conservatives -- pretty much by definition -- distrust change.** This is just not true. Scalia, for one, is an a mission of change.

Conservatives know that they cannot win in a democratic system if they are straightforward about their views, or if they are honest about the consequences of their policy proposals. So they hire people to be dishonest and demagogic. This is pretty explicit with Straussianism, and the neoliberal behavior in Chile suggests that the Chicago School / Hayek types think the same way. Stacking journalism with crpto-conservatives is consistent with that conservative strategy. What we see of the media is consistent with its having been deliberately stacked. Gellman's observations are part of the evidence. So the only question is whether it actually happened that way -- whether the decision-makers behind the scenes have actually been recruited into the neocon-neolib project and are running a deceptive neocon-neolib media. I suggest a well-funded National Science Foundation research project.

Re Gelman, there are a lot of self-proclaimed moderates who are more conservative than they openly admit, and many of them are in positions of influence in the media. I don't want to call it a conspiracy, but that's what it pretty much is. There are a lot of silent agreements and unspoken understandings. As I've said many times, if you think of Donald Graham and Pinch Sulzberger this way, their behavior makes more sense and you can stop asking rhetorical Why Oh Why questions or being baffled at what they allow. The Straussians / neocons are well known for their willingness to subvert democracy with cagy deceptions, but Mirowski's "Road From Mont Pelerin" shows that the Chicago school is equally anti-democratic.