In Lehmann's Terms

The Perils of Popular Friends

Knowing smart folks like AEI's Ted Frank or my old Independent Institute compadre Alex Tabarrok comes in quite handy when I need a quick quote about, say, Ben Bernanke, or John Roberts.

Plus, Ted hosts those panel discussions with the fantastic cookies. And thanks to Alex, I even got to sit in on one of those infamous lunches with George Mason's economists (Messrs. Hanson, Caplan, and Cowen) earlier this week.

But when popular, professional-looking, frequently updated blogs like Marginal Revolution and Point of Law link to the decidedly amateurish and part-time offerings I've got going here -- in the process, directing more than 1,000 hits to a site that had only quite rarely topped more than 50 in a day -- well, gawrsh, it sure does put pressure on a guy to get off his ass and actually post something.

Consider today's prolific output an overcorrection that, in all realistic probability, won't be too oft-repeated. But I'm trying to be better about maintaining at least a slow, steady flow. What's true of monitoring prostate health ought be just as true of blog health, I always say.

If Irony Were Oil, We Could All Afford S.U.V.s

Cafe Hayek's Don Boudreaux on protectionist slogans long thought retired:

A few days ago, while driving on the Washington, DC, beltway, I saw a bumper sticker that I'd not seen in probably a decade.  It's the one that says "Help 10 Americans Lose a Job - Buy a Foreign Car".

This bumper sticker was on the rear of a mid-1980s Buick Regal -- a fact that gave me an idea for two other bumper-sticker slogans:

"Help 10 Americans Lose a Job -- Drive an Old Car"

"Help 10 Americans Lose a Job -- Buy a Used Car"

...Of course, buying foreign cars does nothing to reduce employment.  But if it did, so, too, would the keeping of older cars and the purchase of used cars.

Samalito, jump a little lighter!

While on the subject of SCOTUS nominees, I’ve frankly been a bit surprised, given so much focus on the newest nom’s nickname (“Scalito”) that more political hay hasn’t been made of his 20-year friendship with another Jersey boy, Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff.

Back in 1987, the same year that Trenton native Scalia was appointed associate justice of the Supreme Court, President Reagan named fellow Trenton native Sam Alito – then Ed Meese’s deputy assistant – to be U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. Among his first acts on the job was to recruit as his First Assistant an up-and-coming young prosecutor (and Elizabeth native) by the name of Michael Chertoff away from the position he held across the Hudson River, in the office of the then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York -- Rudolph Giuliani.

Three years later, President George H.W. Bush gave a boost to both Alito’s and Chertoff’s careers, naming Alito to the Third Circuit, where he has served to this day, and Chertoff to be his successor as U.S. Attorney for New Jersey.

Chertoff would later be tapped by the younger President Bush to serve under John Ashcroft, before he was once again reunited with Alito in 2003 by being named, himself, to the Third Circuit. Over the proceeding two years, until Chertoff was named to the Homeland Security post, the two seem to have served on the same panels an unusually large number of times (I’ve never been entirely clear on how panels are selected, but in searching the decisions, their names are on the same cases at a frequency far above what pure chance would seem to predict.)

They nearly always ruled together, which perhaps isn’t so remarkable as one of the notable cases where they disagreed. In 2004’s Doe v. Groody, Chertoff wrote the majority opinion that held the strip search of a 10-year-old and her mother, in a drug case where police had a warrant only to search a man and his home, constituted a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Alito's dissent held that, since the girl and her mom were “in” the house to be searched, any part of their persons was also fair game.

Now, obviously, if having a personal history with members of the nominating administration were sufficient grounds for exclusion, there isn’t a judge out there who would pass the test. But as cases reach the high court – as they almost certainly will, eventually – challenging the Patriot Act, which Chertoff wrote, or the government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, which he had a big hand in bungling, is Sam Alito really the guy I want deciding those matters?

As we say in the Garden State – foogeddabowdit.

Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover

Making the rounds of Cato staffers' sites, Brooke Oberwetter finds a way to make a silk purse from Geena Davis' ear:

The dialogue on Commander in Chief is really some of the worst ever written. Even for me, connoisseur of network crap, it can be hard to take sometimes.  But there is the occasional important lesson to be gleaned from this particular steaming pile.

Last night, for example, that lesson was "How to Gracefully Depart the Situation When an Adivsor Tells You About a National Emergency While You Happen to Be Reading to Adorable Children."  Take note: President Mac said to the kids, "Now, who wants to finish reading this story for me?" after her chief-of-staff whispers something in her ear. The children all raise their adorable little hands, President Mac hands it to one of them, and she exits quickly and with minimal disturbance so that she can go about the business of dealing with the disaster at hand.

Also, we learned that when it comes to hurricanes and damaged oil tankers approaching the coast of Florida, it helps a lot if your FEMA director knows his head from his ass.

Certainly presidential hopefuls should learn these lessons on the off chance that real world events ever imitate this admittedly crappy art.

Commander in Chief airs opposite My Name Is Earl -- of late, the funniest and, I would argue, most moral show on television -- so I haven't yet caught any episodes of liberal Hollywood's latest escapist fantasy about life with one of their own safely ensconsed in the West Wing.

But turning to an earlier show that looked to do the same thing, I hazily recall, somewhere around Season Five of TWW -- long before most people were familiar with the names Roberts, Miers, or Alito -- a plot thread involving the death of the Chief Justice and retirement of an associate justice (or perhaps it was the other way around), leaving President Bartlett with two appointments to make at once. 

Knowing that incessant political squabbling meant that only the blandest and least distinguished of candidates would ever get through the Senate's confirmation ringer, he struck upon the Solomon-like strategy of splitting the nomination baby in half -- appointing two eminently qualified, respected, and opinionated justices, one ultra-liberal and one ultra-conservative (portrayed, respectively, by Glenn Close and that dude who played the creepy Amway-hawking cop in the movie Go.)

The Senate fell for the gambit, overwhelmingly confirmed the nominees, and there was much rejoicing. (Yay!)

So, the moral of the story is -- even when life does imitate television, its lessons are rarely applied.

The dialogue on Commander in Chief is really some of the worst ever written. Even for me, connoisseur of network crap, it can be hard to take sometimes.  But there is the occasional important lesson to be gleaned from this particular steaming pile.

Last night, for example, that lesson was "How to Gracefully Depart the Situation When an Adivsor Tells You About a National Emergency While You Happen to Be Reading to Adorable Children."  Take note: President Mac said to the kids, "Now, who wants to finish reading this story for me?" after her chief-of-staff whispers something in her ear. The children all raise their adorable little hands, President Mac hands it to one of them, and she exits quickly and with minimal disturbance so that she can go about the business of dealing with the disaster at hand.

Also, we learned that when it comes to hurricanes and damaged oil tankers approaching the coast of Florida, it helps a lot if your FEMA director knows his head from his ass.

Certainly presidential hopefuls should learn these lessons on the off chance that real world events ever imitate this admittedly crappy art.

Commander in Chief airs opposite My Name Is Earl -- of late, the funniest and, I would argue, most moral show on television -- so I haven't yet caught any episodes of liberal Hollywood's latest escapist fantasy about life with one of their own safely ensconsed in the West Wing.

But turning to an earlier show that looked to do the same thing, I hazily recall, somewhere around Season Five of TWW -- long before most people were familiar with the names Roberts, Miers, or Alito -- a plot thread involving the death of the Chief Justice and retirement of an associate justice (or perhaps it was the other way around), leaving President Bartlett with two appointments to make at once. 

Knowing that incessant political squabbling meant that only the blandest and least distinguished of candidates would ever get through the Senate's confirmation ringer, he struck upon the Solomon-like strategy of splitting the nomination baby in half -- appointing two eminently qualified, respected, and opinionated justices, one ultra-liberal and one ultra-conservative (portrayed, respectively, by Glenn Close and that dude who played the creepy Amway-hawking cop in the movie Go.)

The Senate fell for the gambit, overwhelmingly confirmed the nominees, and there was much rejoicing. (Yay!)

So, the moral of the story is -- even when life does imitate television, its lessons are rarely applied.

Yes, I'm a Szaszhole

Cato's Will Wilkinson -- blogging at his new site focused on the subject of "happiness studies," and its intersection with public policy -- is rightly skeptical of the claims of folks like The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies author Robert Lane, who would look to draw grand inferences about the present state of human happiness from an observed rise in diagnosis of depression.

This grandly evasive passage from Lane captures the thinness of the evidence and the desperation to build mansions of conjecture upon it:

Rising depression of this magnitude is a tragedy for any civilization, but the epidemological study of these tragic phenomena is dependent on measurement instruments that are being perfected, and the longitudinal data are in their infancy.

That is to say, “We can’t really say with any certainty whether the incidence of depression is really rising or not, but my book will be much more exciting if I act like I know that civilization is in the throes of tragedy.”

As an antidote to depression hysterics, I strongly recommend “The Age of Depression,” by Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield in the penultimate edition of the Public Interest.

After examining the epidemiological numbers, they write:

No plausible theory of depressive disorder, whether genetic, psychological, or social, can explain why rates of depression would have increased so much in such a short period of time. Instead, the explanation appears to lie in changes in the ways that physicians, mental-health professionals, and people themselves characterize and diagnose their mental states. There are, and always have been, true depressive disorders, in which the response to loss goes awry and takes on a debilitating life of its own. But in the past, such disorders were distinguished from normal sadness that arises in response to life’s vicissitudes. That traditional, common-sense distinction has broken down in contemporary psychiatry, resulting in the conflation of depressive disorders with normal sadness. The sources and social implications of this breakdown are as yet largely unappreciated. [emphasis added]

Horwitz and Wakfield provide a fascinating history of depression through the ages and an extremely illuminating account of how theory wars over the DSM categories led to an overly inclusive “theory neutral” clinical conception of depression.

Valuable points, all, but I think Will is still being too forgiving of the initial proposition that there could be anything "scientific" about subjective, normative evaluations of revealed behavior.

Horwitz and Wakefield draw a line in the sand between the historic contextual conception of melancholy, which distinguished between sadness "with or without cause," and the modern diagnostic tools of the DSM-4 that look only at symptoms. But both still essentially posit a "disorder" for which no discernable and corresponding abnormal pathology of the brain or body can be identified.

Perhaps depressive behavior is a manifest symptom of disease, which we'd normally say is caused either by a bug (virus or bacterium) or from misfiring of some physical system due to damage from either external sources (say, exposure to carcinogens, or simply too much ingested cholesterol) or internal ones (such as genetic abnormality.) Neuroscience seeks out the answers to these questions, but it still has a long way to go. The psychiatric profession, by and large, pretends the questions don't matter.

But without those answers, it seems to me no less capricious and arbitrary to hinge diagnosis of a presumed "depressive disorder" on whether a person appears to have a "good" reason to display sadness, than simply whether that display exists at all. Actually, presuming there might be asymptomatic manifestations of "depressive disorder" -- a presumption applied to most medical disorders, but rarely pondered by psychiatry -- how could one conclude that a person who otherwise appears perfectly cheerful isn't actually similarly afflicted?

For that matter, without an identified bug we could point to definitively as cause the depressive behavior, who is to say that Prozac is any more effective a treatment to alleviate its effects than whiskey and wine, those time-honored lubricants for smoothing life's more jagged edges?