According to a report released by the Brookings Institution, Los Angeles is the most carbon efficient major city in the country(besides Honoulu). And although it may seem suprising that, in a vacuum, this car obsessed, air conditioning using, sprawling, coal powered Ecology of Fear could be so green, it actually makes quite a bit of sense.

For one, Los Angeles is reasonably dense. Because the LA basin itself is hemmed in by the Hollywood Hills and the Ocean, a huge number of people live in a rather smallish area. Even the San Fernando Valley, the image of horrible sprawl, is surrounded by hills that retard further development. Secondly, lots of West coast areas did well because of their temperate climates which require less heating. Heating, because it raises temperatures from very cold to bearable requires a lot more energy than air conditioning, which lowers temepratures from very hot to bearable. (The actual degree change, and thus energy expended, is much less).  

Although there are some caveats - the survey used statewide averages for carbon emitted by power sources and it didn't include far-flung LA suburbs like Riverisde and San Bernadino counties - it still shows that there's something about the West coast combination of density and temperate weather that allows for relatively green living arrangments. 

When most people think about autism, the horrible spectre of a criplling disabled, socially non-existent child who is likely to have an incredibly hard life with years of expensive medical and psychological treatment and will never live on their own. Well, many of those with autism spectrum disorders (which includes Aspergers) don't particularly view their condition as a "disease" or a "disability" but more as an alternate neurological wiring that gives them a unqiue, and ultimately beneficial, view of the world.

Andrew Solomon has a fantastic - and utterly convincing - piece in New York about the debates in the autism community that everyone should read. My thoughts below.

One of the most annoying aspects of news coverage related to the youth vote is the assumption that if celebrities are involved, us young voters will just blindly follow our favorite pop stars to the voting booth. And considering that most celebrtities are not the most articulate politlcal advocates, it's pretty silly to look to them for politilcal advice. Unless, of course, they're Lil Wayne or DMX.

Yes, it's a link to my own blog, but I'm pretty sure the content is NSFCP. 

In response to the study done by the Association of University Women detailing the lack of a boys crisis in education, many have pointed two possible methodological flaws. One, the group doing the research is self-interested - in 1992, they did a study decrying the state of girls in public education, and it's impossible to imagine them publishing research saying that there is a boy crisis. The second line of criticism is that the study focuses on high school testing and other federally recognized measures of achievement as opposed to more "meaningful" metrics like GPAs and bachelor degrees awarded.

The first criticism could be important, if less obviously self-interested parties hadn't come to virtually identical conclusions. But Sara Mead, in a paper for Education Sector, reached much the same conclusions. So let's just deal with the second criticism, that the AAUW and Mead are using the wrong metrics. The main point that Mead makes in her paper is that both boys and girls are improving their academic achievement, it's just that girls are doing so faster. In math and reading, boys - especially younger ones - have either been holding steady since the 1970s, or have actually improved (on math especially).

And even though much boy crisis rhetoric is framed as a relative decline to girls, the fact that there's no evidence of a real decline in absolute measures like test scores certainly takes out the dire urgency that many boy crisis believers have. And even when you compare boys and girls, Mead concludes that "there has been no radical or recent decline in boys' per­form­ance relative to girls. Nor is there a clear overall trend—boys score higher in some areas, girls in others." And in so much as there is stagnation in achievement, it occurs at around 17 ( the oldest age the NAEP tests at) for both genders. So it's not that high schools have to be fixed for boys, it's for both genders.

But what Ronald Bailey and others point out is that perhaps we should look at GPAs, drop out rates and college performance instead of high school academic achievement, the gap emerges. But when it comes to college enrollment, we see that men have been going to college more, just at slower rates than women. When two groups are improving, and one is doing so faster, the proportions are always going to change. And when it comes to graduate degrees - which are a good indicator of educational and occupational achievement and status - women get less than half of the professional and doctorate degrees.

Basically, the data is muddled as to how real or important any educational gender gaps are. What we do know is that there are very real gaps when it comes to women's earnings in the workplace as well as real educational achievement gaps based on race and class. Those should be the disparities that we focus on, not the phantom of a boy crisis.

According to a new study done by the American Association of University Women, the "boy crisis" in education isn't actually real. Yes, it turns out that an argument based on hazy gender essentialism (boys are too impatient to raise their hands and turn in their work on time!) is seriously faulty.

The study looked at 40 years of academic achievement between 4th grade and college and found that "academic success is more closely associated with family income than with gender." This doesn't mean, however, that there aren't gender gaps in education. The study found that there is a gap in math scores among 17 year olds (boys do better), a literacy/reading gap across the age spectrum (girls do better) but that among students entering college, these gaps basically dissapear. 

And even though women tend to have higher grade point averages (3.09 to 2.86) and receive 57 percent of all bachelor's degrees, it's still hard to make an argument that the educational system is hurting boys when women still earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn. Also, more men than ever are going to college and getting degrees.

So while it's nice to know that reports of a boy crisis are greatly exaggerated, it's still distressing that there are very real educational gaps that plague our society, and they are based on race and class. 

It's long been noted that as far as youth political activism goes, there's a lot more money and influence on the Republican side.

Frank Foer, now editor of The New Republic, wrote a great piece entitled "Swimming With The Sharks" detailing the 2005 campaign for the presidency of the College Republicans. Not only does the position pay $75,000,it was also the stepping stone for GOP operatives like Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff. To give you some insight into how intense the campaign was; the loser, Michael Davidson, raised $200,000. The president of the College Democrats, on the other hand, raised 2,000. Oh yeah, and he doesn't get paid a cent.

Haim Saban, the biggest political fundraiser in the country and a major Clinton backer, is trying to change the dynamic. And he's doing it by allegedly having offered the Young Democrats of America one million dollars in exchange for their two super delegates endorsing Hillary Clinton. According to the Huffington Post, the group's president, David Hardt, turned Saban down and won't be making an endorsement until the primaries are over. Although such sleezy activities aren't technically illegal, they are certainly..well...sleezy. But hey, at least there's some money sloshing around Democratic youth organizations.

Kevin Carey (via Yglesias) notes that the Cato Institute has moved from supporting vouchers for private schools to tax credits. Yglesias and Carey both go over the basic objection to this scheme: not only are all the problems with vouchers still applicable to tax credits - the results aren’t any better, voucher programs often “leave behind” kids in special education programs in public schools, they drain resources etc etc - but the credits are incredibly regressive. Carey estimates that using Cato’s “sample legislation” that a DC family making 20,000 dollars a year would only get a credit of $200, hardly enough to pay tuition at a private school. And if the credit is for income taxes, it does nothing for those who are too poor to pay income taxes - who, of course, are the very people that Cato et al want to be going to private schools.

The second part of the proposal that makes no sense is that one of the rationales is that voucher programs lead to direct taxpayer subsidy of private education options that taxpayers could object to. For example, taxpayers could well object to funding Catholic education or Islamic education. According to Cato, with the tax credits, “With tax credits, people are either spending their own money on their own children…No one has to pay for education they find objectionable.” And while the tax credit wouldn’t result in direct, compulsory funding of objectionable educational options, Cato is being sketchy with saying that there’s a substantial difference. After all, the very purpose of these tax credits is to fund private education just like vouchers, without the direct government subsidy. Carey says “The political rationale for the policy, meanwhile, rests on the fiction that there’s a difference between the government handing you a dollar and the government not making you pay a dollar you would have otherwise owed in taxes.”

Jeffrey Rosen isn't happy with the Court's decision:

So what makes the legal reasoning so inflammatory? Most controversially, the Court held that sexual orientation discrimination should be treated just as skeptically as racial discrimination–a conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court and the other state Supreme Courts have refused to accept. Social conservatives are already invoking contested science to question one of the premises of this conclusion: that sexual orientation, like race, is immutable. “There is no evidence to establish that a homosexual lifestyle is an immutable characteristic such as race,” a lawyer for Advocates for Faith and Freedom told The New York Times. There was no need to open this Pandora’s Box: The Court could have held more modestly that there are no rational reasons for limiting the label “marriage” to straight people and denying it to gays and lesbians.

 

Marriage equality makes me happy:

Gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry in California, the state Supreme Court said today in a historic ruling that could be repudiated by the voters in November.

In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the “fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship.” The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when the decision takes effect in 30 days.

What’s interesting about this decision, especially considering the inevitable cries of judicial activism from conservatives, is that this is exactly what Governor Schwarzenegger wanted to happen. When the California legislature twice passed bills legalizing gay marriage, Schwarzenegger vetoed them, saying that he didn’t want to override Proposition 22, which prevented California from recognizing out of state or international same-sex marriages. He also explicitly stated that he was amenable to either a proposition or the courts settling the issue. And now the courts have settled the issue, despite the fact that there is sure to be another proposition passing a constitutional amendment to get rid of same-sex marriage. But I’m optimistic - it’s unlikely that a socially liberal state will want to nullify the thousands of marriages that are sure to happen before the next election. This would square the circle of the decision being viewed as democratically legitimate - if the people refuse to overturn it, they’d essentially be giving their stamp of approval.

For more on the complicated mess that is California, same sex marriage and the constitution, read Josh Patashnik.

As Kay said below, today is Fair Pay Day, and so it seems appropriate to share my thoughts.

There are a lot of problems with the Bush administration’s argument that civil liberties have to be restricted for the duration of the War on Terror.  The first is that the War on Terror is necessarily endless; how can we ever say it will be over?  The second problem is related to the first, that because it’s really unclear who exactly the enemy is and because governments tend to use their power as expansively as possible, it’s inevitable that there will be abuses of these new powers.  Just think, if you’re an FBI agent, and you have this sweet new authorization to get warrants with less stringent judicial oversight, wouldn’t you try to use that power as much as possible?  Well, they have been:

The FBI has increasingly used administrative orders to obtain the personal records of U.S. citizens rather than foreigners implicated in terrorism or counterintelligence investigations, and at least once it relied on such orders to obtain records that a special intelligence-gathering court had deemed protected by the First Amendment, according to two government audits released yesterday.

The episode was outlined in a Justice Department report that concluded the FBI had abused its intelligence-gathering privileges by issuing inadequately documented “national security letters” from 2003 to 2006, after which changes were put in place that the report called sound…

A report a year ago by the Justice Department’s inspector general disclosed that abuses involving national security letters had occurred from 2003 through 2005 and helped provoke the changes. But the report makes it clear that the abuses persisted in 2006 and disclosed that 60 percent of the nearly 50,000 security letters issued that year by the FBI targeted Americans…

In total, Fine said, the FBI issued almost 200,000 national security letters from 2003 through 2006, and they were used in a third of all FBI national security and computer probes during that time. Fine said his investigators have identified hundreds of possible violations of laws or internal guidelines in the use of the letters, including cases in which FBI agents made improper requests, collected more data than they were allowed to, or did not have proper authorization to proceed with the case.

The empirical evidence that any specific cultural celebration of violence - violent music, tv shows, movies, wrestling - actually causes real violence is vague at best.

In fact, there is good empirical evidence that events like Combat Zone Wrestling can actually reduce violence.  The way this works out is that a whole lot of criminal violence - assaults and the like - are caused by the combination of two volatile elements.  Crowds of young men and alcohol.  Any place where you have young men drinking, the likelihood of there being some violence is pretty high, relatively speaking.  Ever seen a bar or night club closing (not that I have…)?  And so anything that can take young men, especially those who would be more likely to be violent after a few drinks,  out of bars and into an environment where they will spend a good portion of the night not drinking, you are basically sure to see a reduction in violence.  Two University of California economists did research looking at the effect of large showings of violent movies and had some encouraging results:

Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead.

“You’re taking a lot of violent people off the streets and putting them inside movie theaters,” said the lead author of the study, Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of California, San Diego. “In the short run, if you take away violent movies, you’re going to increase violent crime.”

Professor Dahl and the paper’s other author, Stefano DellaVigna, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, attach precise numbers to their argument: Over the last decade, they say, the showing of violent films in the United States has decreased assaults by an average of about 1,000 a weekend, or 52,000 a year.

Replace “violent movies” with “Combat Zone Wrestling” and I imagine the effect is identical if not even more pronounced.  So how does this effect our moral or cultural evaluation of CZW?  What do we value more: vague, unsubstantiated claims that Combat Zone Wrestling is bad for our culture because we feel icky about it, or empirical evidence that things like Combat Zone Wrestling actually have a real effect of reducing violent assaults?  I don’t  know the answer, but this research is definitely something to keep in mind next time anyone talks wrestling or any public display of violence as some kind of cancer on our culture.

I guess at this point, the Bush administration doesn't even care how cravenly it ignores the advice of the professional staff in the executive branch so as to push through more industry friendly policy. First we had the unprecedented denial of a special waiver for California to have stricter auto emissions standards, and now the EPA is refusing to listen to its own staff in setting up ozone emission regulation:

The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday limited the allowable amount of pollution-forming ozone in the air to 75 parts per billion, a level significantly higher than what the agency's scientific advisers had urged for this key component of unhealthy air pollution.

While this is certainly the bad part about allowing the executive branch to effectively write laws, it's still refreshing that Stephen Johnson's bid to rewrite the Clean Air Act so as to consider the interests of polluters more in the emission-standard setting process still has to go through Congress. And with Barbara Boxer being the chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, it's unlikely that industry favorable statutory language is going to be passed by Congress anytime in the foreseeable future.

What's really annoying about all this is how the President personally intervened to overrule the unanimous opinion of the EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which initially wanted a 60 ppm standard and at worst a 70 ppm. Johnson, is statutorily not allowed to consider the costs of setting a new emission standard and is supposed to just consider what is the best for protecting the health of the population. And the scientific evidence seems to indicate that there are real gains between a 75 ppm and 70 or a 60 ppm standard. So he clearly was considering the costs - some 8.8 billion - of compliance. Now say what you will about the way the EPA formulates its standards and what it's supposed to consider when writing regulation, but it's pretty damn obvious that Johnson isn't following the spirit or perhaps even the letter of his own agencies guidelines. Of course, I can't say I'm all too surprised.

Starting about a year ago, my school's college counselors gravely informed us that because of demographics, this year would be the hardest ever to get into college.   According to the Times, however, the number of high schools seniors is going to peak in about two years, making about 99% of colleges less selective:

Projections show that by next year or the year after, the annual number of high school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. The number is then expected to decline until about 2015. Most universities expect this to translate into fewer applications and less selectivity, with most students likely finding it easier to get into college.

Although it's certainly true that good schools have gotten more selective, there's a bit more to this trend then simply admittance percentages going down.  The first oddity is that while the elite schools have gone from incredibly selective to total crapshoot (Harvard, Yale and Princeton admit less than 10% of their applicants, despite 85% being perfectly qualified to go), the number of good, selective schools has skyrocketed.  Schools like Emory and USC, which only a decade or two ago were considered mediocre rich kid schools, have, because of their bulging endowments, been able to snatch up the best professors and students.  USC, for example, will not only offer scholarships to good students, but will just straight up hand out cash.   Also, due to the increasing financial returns to a college education, the number of objectively highly qualified students, with good SAT scores and what, has also increased due to the incentives.  This means that, from the other end, the number of good schools has to go up because there's been a downward flow in where the good students are going to school.  Add on the fact that because of applications being predominately online and most schools accepting the Common Application, it's become much, much easier to apply to a bunch of good schools, and consequently, acceptance rates have to go down. 

But while the stress and amount of work associated with trying to get into a competitive school has certainly gone up - as I can attest - the actual quality of American higher education, at the highest level, has probably gone up more.   

In the United States, there's a large and growing problem of elites not serving in the military and, at the same time, the military becoming an institution dominated by the lower middle classes and by families who have a tradition of service.  Although America has lower social mobility and lots of hereditary wealth, in Britain, they have a real royal family.  But Britain's royals have a long tradition of military service.  Prince Andrew, Charles' brother, served as helicopters pilot in the Falklands. And Prince Harry, brother of Prince William and third-in-line to the throne, is serving in the British Army. 

Even though he's a royal, he's just a normal soldier and for the past ten weeks, he's been serving in Afghanistan.  But we didn't hear about until a few days ago, when the Drudge Report broke the story.  It turned out the British government got all the major media outlets in a room and requested that they not report that Harry was in Afghanistan, so he wouldn't endanger his fellow soldiers.  The embargo was broken and now Harry is probably going to the Persian Gulf.  But was it a good idea for the media to essentially be the lapdogs of the press?  I think so.

William F. Buckley Jr, who died today, was mostly known for founding and editing National Review and being a leading conservative intellectual, journalist and thinker for more 5 decades.  But before founding National Review, he wrote God and Man at Yale. He was in many ways the original conservative critic of the academy.  God and Man was a polemic against the liberal atheism, or at least agnoisticism, among Yale faculty.  Buckley anticipated those right wing critics who today think that college campuses are much too liberal, except he was doing it 50 years ago.

 But more importantly, Buckley should be a model to all of us young writers looking to influence the political scene.  Buckley wrote God and Man when he was 25, and founded the most influential political magazine of the last half-century when he was 29.  And even though he was a conservatives’ conservative, he still appreciated youthful vigor and energy in his movement that he did some much to shape.  He was an enthusiastic Goldwater supporter and helped found Young Americans for Freedom in 1960 so as to channel youthful energy into movement conservatism.  In modern liberal blog terms, he was some freaky combination of Matt Yglesias, Markos Moulistas and Rick Perlstein – except conservative.

There's a whole lot anyone can learn from Buckley the man - he was kind, urbane, sensitive, intelligent and an amazing stylist.  But we liberals and progressives rightly are repulsed by his politics.  But there's also Buckley the institution builder.  And he was greatly responsible for turning conservatism into the institutional force it is.  And he was able to do it by providing ideological coherence and also by energizing and deploying young people to be proud, excited conservatives.  But he also viewed conservatism as distinct from the Republican party and was ready to abandon the party when he thought it wasn't conservative enough.  He should be the model for what we self-styled progressives are doing today -  building a set of institutions to make progressivism a lasting force in American politics.  And while many of us are supporters of the Democratic party, we recognize that our movement has to be more than a partisan one.  In short, we need to be like Buckley to reverse the gains him and his movement have chalked up in the last 50 years. 

Mexican immigrants - legal and illegal - are less educated and have lower incomes than the rest of the population, so it makes sense that they would have a higher crime rate than average.  It turns out, in California at least, that they don’t.  And the difference between Mexican immigrants and the average isn’t just trivial, it’s rather significant.  It’s easy to explain why this is true for illegal immigrants — they have a huge incentive to avoid any contact with law enforcement and so the benefit gained from the commission of crime is easily outweighed by the possibility of deportation.

And, of course, software engineers in the US on H-1B visas don’t commit crimes at any high rates, and Mexicans don’t either.  From a study by the Public Policy Institute of California:

Noncitizen men from Mexico between the ages of 18 and 40, which the study indicated were more likely to be in the country illegally, were eight times less likely to be in a “correctional setting,” the study found.

Kay makes a ton of good points about the recent Foreign Policy survey of military officers, specifically their views on ways to increase the size of the force and retain good officers ("moral waivers" for criminals are not the best way to go).  One small error, however, was which option for increasing recruitment was the most popular among officers. It was  "Service for citizenship," which means that immigrants or permanent residents who don't have citizenship would serve in the Armed Forces and then receive citizenship upon the completion of their service.  It garnered some 78% support in the survey.

There are both good reasons to support and oppose this idea.  On one hand, there's nothing like the military to forge connections and love for America and really making solid citizens.  Also, becoming a citizenship confers all sorts of protections and benefits to immigrants that they can't get otherwise.  On the other hand, considering that many people signing up for the military are going to Iraq, there's the disheartening thought of marginalized immigrants having to risk their lives in Iraq for citizenship.  

More interestingly, from a historical standpoint, is just how imperial "service for citizenship" is.  The British, Roman and French empires were more than willing to enlist their subject populations into the military.  Not too surprisingly, modern day fan of imperialism, Max Boot is a very strong advocate for service for citizenship. He, along with liberal hawk Michael O'Hanlon, wrote a Washington Post op-ed advocating for the policy. 

*Post title is from the classic film, based upon the classic Robert Heinlein book, Starship Troopers.  In the weird, global-militarist future Heinlein envisions, one can only vote and be a citizen after having served in the military. 

New York Times: "Top Hezbollah Leader Commander Killed in Syria Bombing”

 Al-Jazeera: “Hezbollah Mourns Senior Leader”

Tyler Cowen links to a study showing that only are ethanol subsidies inefficient, but that reliance on biofuels like corn could increase CO2 emissions due to the deforestation encouraged by high corn prices. While everyone has known that corn-ethanol is one of the largest boondoggles in recent memory, it’s a good example of why energy investment strategies, absent some sort of increased pricing for carbon, are bound to fail. When you just invest in “clean” technologies, absent making CO2 emitting energy sources more expensive, you have the government picking winners. And you don’t have to be a hard-core public choicer to know that the decisions for who gets massive amounts of government money are often guided by less than enlightened motives.

This is why I’m confused by people like Jim Manzi, Bjorn Lomberg or Nordhaus and Schellenberger who emphasize investment so heavily while criticizing reducing emissions through pricing mechanisms. Especially because the two strategies are so complementary — we could fund our new energy investments with the revenue raised from a carbon tax or cap-and-trade! But absent some sort of external way to drive up the price of carbon, there’s no way to discipline these investments to make sure they’re something else than hand-outs to politically well connected industries.