Liberté, égalité, fraternité et uniformité

I'm back, but I'm pretty fried, so all you're getting is a link to a Language Log post about Bastille Day and the languages of France and a quote from it:

From a linguistic point of view, however, the French Revolution was a disaster. The monarchy had been largely unconcerned with what languages its subjects spoke. At the time, the languages spoken by natives of France included six Romance languages: French, Occitan, Franco-Provencal, Walloon, Catalan, and Corsican (a dialect of Italian), the Germanic languages Flemish and German, the Celtic language Breton, and Basque. Some of these, especially French and Occitan, each had numerous divergent forms. Additional languages, such as Berber and Tahitian, now qualify as "French". A full list may be found in the Cerquiglini report Les Langues de la France.

One of the effects of the Revolution was to bring about a greatly increased centralization of the French government and a policy of establishing a standard form of French as the only language of the Republic. I emphasize that the policy adopted was not merely to ensure that all French citizens shared a common language, but to eliminate all competitors. This is readily seen in the title of the report by the Abbé Grégoire establishing the policy: Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d'anéantir les patois et d'universaliser la langue française "Report on the necessity and means of annihlating the dialects and of making the French Language universal". Since the Revolution, all French governments have been hostile to minority languages.

To be continued...

So, I'm leaving tomorrow for All Good and won't be back till Sunday night. My brain will probably be pretty fried, so I'll likely resume blogging on about Tuesday and a half. I trust that you'll all be good while I'm gone. In the meantime, enjoy a random Wikipedia article.

Cogeneration overregulation

As a follow up to a post I made about energy incentives in America, I found this article from Forbes about the regulatory impediments to electrical cogeneration – that is, producing power and trapping the excess heat and using it to heat nearby buildings. These sorts of projects are most economical for large institutions, who have enough demand for electricity that they have on-site generators, which are close enough to the buildings to allow the heat to be piped in. In some cases, the efficiency boost can be dramatic: the article says that some power plants run at 30% efficiency, which can be raised to 80% if a cogeneration plant is used.

The types of regulations that hamper the construction of cogeneration plants are pretty typical, but drive home the detrimental effect of these sorts of regulations on small firms and preclude well-functioning markets by putting up barriers to entry:

"It's one thing to absorb regulatory or legal review or another round of process on a five- or six-megawatt project," says Thornton. "But to have that same process applied to a one-megawatt project? The benefits don't outweigh. … Not when the utilities can do this rope-a-dope." [...]

Utilities that want to can often hit projects with repeated delays. Elliott describes the sort of scenarios he's seen. "Require an interconnection study, takes 60 days, present the study, 60 days to do that, the utility takes 90 days to review that, then if they have any questions, you have another 30 days. … When it adds up, it may take a year or two or three. And time is money."

Some time and money are, of course, needed to ensure that the system integrates properly, Elliott says, but gratuitous delays have "killed more CHP projects than anything else," he says.

So it's a bit weird that even after acknowledging the regulatory impediments to the free market increasing efficiency and decreasing pollution, the article leaves you with the impression that deregulation in this specific field and new regulations on emissions are somehow linked:

"There are enlightened utilities and regulators who see carbon trading … and energy efficiency as part of the new mix going forward," Thornton says. "But I'm not ready to say we're one big happy family and everyone is kumbaya."

Maybe it's just me, but given that we've identified places where the free market would do better than a regulated market, it seems like we should first deregulate, and see if that results in the desired effect rather than imposing new regulations (i.e., carbon trading and carbon taxes).

(HT: Knowledge Problem)

The cost of a dropped copula*

You can file this one under the "obvious" category too, but it's interesting to see it verified academically. According to a paper by U. Chicago professor Jeffrey Grogger, a study controlled for socioeconomic factors found that "sounding black" will cost you about a tenth of the wage earned by someone who "sounds white," regardless of your actual race. Similarly, a southern accent will have about the same effect, though the penalty is a bit lower. (A note to non-native English speakers: though black English is similar to and has roots in southern English, it's very easy for Americans to differentiate between them.) I only read summaries of the paper, but a quick Cmd+F and the comments of a NYT blog post about the paper tell me that the study only looked at those two English accents/dialects, and didn't test the effects of having other sorts of regional accents (say, Midwestern or New York). Given that sounding black and sounding like you're from the South are about equally detrimental, I'd guess that the difference comes in people trying to use accent as a proxy for class, and associating black and southern English with being low class. The measure of racism is probably the differential between the hit you take from being from the South and the hit you take from being black.

* A linguistics joke – speakers of black English tend to drop the copula, which is any form of the verb "to be." See the AAVE Wikipedia article's section on grammar for more on the nitty-gritty linguistic details of black English.

BBC: Russia 'backed Litvinenko murder'

As if it needed to be said:

The murder of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko was carried out with the backing of the Russian state, Whitehall sources have told the BBC.

A senior security official told Newsnight there were "very strong indications it was a state action". [...]

The BBC has been told that Russia's internal security organisation, the FSB, operated under Mr Putin with far more autonomy than the organisations usually entrusted with foreign espionage operations.

Our source said: "We very strongly believe the Litvinenko case to have had some state involvement."

Newsnight has also learned that officers at MI5 believe they thwarted an attempt last summer to kill another Russian dissident, Boris Berezovsky.

The BBC's source said the Berezovsky incident showed "continued FSB willingness to consider operations against people in the West". [...]

In November, head of MI5 Jonathan Evans expressed concern that there had been "no decrease" in the number of Russian covert intelligence officers operating in the UK since the end of the Cold War.

The service believes there are around 30 operating from Russian diplomatic missions here.

My personal opinion on why they killed Litvinenko was that it had something to do with what he knew about 9/11 and related Russian sponsorship of Islamic terrorism. Because it sure doesn't seem worth it to kill him over something like this, when no one outside of Russia seemed to care much. You can find a full archive of Russia-related posts here.

They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot

In the field of urbanism and land use policy, there are two major anti-market forces at work in America: zoning laws that mandate low density, and parking laws that mandate lots of parking. Both are often ignored when it comes to discussions of transportation and the environment, but the Washington Post has a rare story about parking. The story is specifically focused on Tysons Corner, a suburban edge city outside of DC which has become a major job center in recent years. The town's Wikipedia article calls it "the opposite of a bedroom community, with a daytime population greater than 70,000 and a nighttime population of about 18,000."

Anyway, like most edge cities in America, the place is literally paved over, with 40 million square feet of parking compared to 28 million square feet of office space. And at 167,000 spots in total, there are more than three times the number of spots (50,000) as in "downtown Washington" (what exactly that means – everything in DC? – is unclear). Though the article laments all this parking, it's never exactly clear why there is so much parking. Is it built by the government, or built by private developers? Do the developers build it because that's what the market demands, or do they build it because minimum parking regulations force them to? The article gives a few hints that it's the government, not the developers, who want all the parking:

Yet private developers, including the big retailers, are ready to do with less parking. They welcome the chance to spend less money building parking structures, which can cost as much as $40,000 per parking space. [...]

"The market quickly figured out that you didn't need as much parking," said Arlington board member Chris Zimmerman (D). [...]

"County planners may also be an impediment, Schwartz said, noting that the county increased its parking requirements recently for some developments."

Overall, I'm not terribly impressed with the article. It could have gone a lot deeper explaining why exactly there is so much parking, discussing the economics of minimum parking regulations and the Catch-22 that says that mass transit won't be built without density, but density won't be allowed without transit. Or they could have picked a developer and had him discuss the costs of the project and layout of a particular project if he built the whole thing according to how he wants it, versus the plan that he'll eventually be forced to accept due to minimum parking regulations. For a deeper treatment of the subject, see Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking. I haven't read the book, but it sure looks interesting – you can find reviews and discussion of the book and the idea here, here, and here, with an ungated article from 1999 by the author on the same subject here.

(HT: Planetizen, an invaluable daily stream of articles related to land use, urbanism, and transportation.)

Naomi Klein's misguided understanding of capitalism

Normally I wouldn't waste time trying to debunk Naomi Klein, but her use of the term "capitalism" to describe decidedly statist policies has really been getting to me lately. In an article for The Nation called "Disaster Capitalism, State of Extortion" she again pulls what I like to call "pulling a Naomi Klein" – she berates the Bush administration for its obeisance to markets, admits that it's interfering with markets, and concludes capitalism is therefore the problem. The article is a bit schizophrenic (but then again, when are here thoughts not?), but focuses on three main issues: oil in Iraq, oil in Anwar, and the food crisis.

On Iraqi oil, apparently she thinks that no-bid contracts are the paragon of capitalism, and even that these uncompetitive contracts "will raise more money" – but how handing over concessions to a company without looking for higher bidders will raise more money, she never explains. Furthermore, she never explains why a capitalist – that is, someone with a single-minded drive for profit – wouldn't put a contract out for competitive bidding. On Anwar she makes a little more sense, saying that the resources up there are miniscule compared to the global market for oil.

But on food prices, she again loses it. Despite a leaked report by the World Bank that says the rises in food prices are largely due to pro-ethanol, anti-capitalist state intervention in agriculture, she conveniently ignores the fact that capitalism is obviously the solution to the food crisis, not the problem (Raționalitate on food here). She goes on a little rant about genetically modified crops, saying "there is no evidence that GMOs increase crop yields, and they often decrease them." This might be true (though I kind of doubt it), but if it were, then what's the problem? Has the Bush administration been forcing farmers to use GM crops? If they're so ineffective, then wouldn't those greedy profit seekers not use them? And in the same breath that she deprecates GM crops, she berates corporations for patenting those oh-so-ineffective crops and depriving others of their use. Although attacking intellectual property as it relates to food genetics is certainly justified, she implicitly associates intellectual property with a free market agenda, despite the divide among libertarians on whether IP is justified (and, hence, whether or not it qualifies as "capitalist"). Those who come out (to some degree or another) against IP range from the traditionally libertarian to the hard-core anarcho-capitalists (not to mention myself), though you'd have no way of knowing that from her article.

Naomi Klein almost always has legitimate points, but she's often profoundly confused about the difference between capitalism and statism. What she calls "disaster capitalism" (a favorite topic of hers – she even wrote a book about it) is more accurately termed state capitalism, but don't count on Naomi to be able to discern distinctions so subtle.

Edit: Cato actually has a takedown of Klein's aforementioned book here if you're interested – I haven't read her book, and I've only skimmed this article, but from what I've read of Klein's, debunking her is a job that anyone with half a brain could do pretty well.

Learning from the best

File this under too good to be true. And by good, I mean horribly, horribly wrong:

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. [...]

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

This caught my attention because I've been reading recently a very unflattering biography of Mao called Mao: The Unknown Story. I haven't gotten to the part about the Korean War yet, though it's already been one of the most educational books I've ever read. I didn't know much about Soviet support of the Nationalists and Communists in China, the Asian half of World War II, or the Chinese Civil War, but now I feel like I understand them much better than any history book ever told it. I suppose that's the peril of trying to sound unbiased – sometimes, the radicals happen to be right.

Pot referendum in California

Update, Dec. 16, 2009: The referendum will be on the 2010 ballot. It's not the same exact ballot initiative that I discussed in the post below, but it does indeed put the question of full legalization to voters.

Apparently, if Christopher Springer gets his way, and he can collect about 700,000 signatures, a referendum will be put to Californians in November of whether to legalize (sort of) marijuana for everyone over the age of 18, and let it be sold anywhere alcohol is. The title of the article – "California to legalize weed for everyone" – is a bit misleading, but the initiative is very much real, and you can read the full text on the California Attorney General's site, here. As it is now, California has legalized medicinal marijuana, but the rules are so lax and the incentives to plentiful that with $100, you can see a doctor and, pretty much without hassle, get a prescription for anxiety, insomnia, or any other unverifiable, widespread ailment. The referendum, if passed, would impose a tax of $5 on each eighth of an ounce sold (that's the most common unit of sale, which retails for between $20 and $70 depending on quality, and is enough for anywhere from ten to thirty joints), plus a $50 tax on growing plants (which can yield many ounces). There would be some anonymizing provision to keep the feds away, who insist that regulating the use and sale of marijuana is within their purview as per the Commerce Clause. Despite marijuana's illegality, its use is fairly widespread: over 40% of Americans admit having tried it (the highest in the world), a number that is sure to grow as older generations who weren't exposed to it die out and younger ones replace them.

Republicrats

Just to hammer home the incredibly similarity of America's only two parties*, the Tax Policy Center lays out the costs of of both presidential candidates plans for America:

TPC estimates that in 2013, Obama would collect revenues of 18.2 percent of GDP. McCain would bring in about 17.8 percent. Spending that year would be about 19.5 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office, assuming the Iraq war will be winding down.

That's a difference of 0.4 percentage points in GDP. And it's important to measure spending and not revenues, because any deficit spending will result in inflation, which acts as a only vaguely-recognized tax on American citizens, but also anyone else who owns dollar bills.

*Sorry, third parties, but America's voting system is stacked impossibly against you. If another party enters the scene, it won't be as a third party, but as a future member of the two-party system, like it always has been.