White elites, shockingly, seem to enjoy cities where the culture is dominated by white elites. Aaron Renn breaks the news.

Among the media, academia and within planning circles, there’s a generally standing answer to the question of what cities are the best, the most progressive and best role models for small and mid-sized cities. The standard list includes Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver. In particular, Portland is held up as a paradigm, with its urban growth boundary, extensive transit system, excellent cycling culture, and a pro-density policy. These cities are frequently contrasted with those of the Rust Belt and South, which are found wanting, often even by locals, as “cool” urban places.

But look closely at these exemplars and a curious fact emerges. If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group.

He’s even got a handy dandy chart:

Not noted in the article but worth mentioning in this context: The “African Americans” in Minneapolis are mostly Africans, not Americans. There’s a huge Somali refuge population as a function of rather recent public policy decisions.

This raises troubling questions about these cities. Why is it that progressivism in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African Americans? Can you have a progressive city properly so-called with only a disproportionate handful of African Americans in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?

What is it that these cities are supposed to do? Send out advertisements for more blacks to move there?! Our black population is concentrated in the Deep South, for obvious reasons, and in a handful of urban centers that were built around industrial jobs and therefore encouraged a huge migration.

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip? Many of the policies of Portland are not that dissimilar from those of upscale suburbs in their effects. Urban growth boundaries and other mechanisms raise land prices and render housing less affordable exactly the same as large lot zoning and building codes that mandate brick and other expensive materials do. They both contribute to reducing housing affordability for historically disadvantaged communities. Just like the most exclusive suburbs.

Now, I live in the Washington, DC area, which is incredibly diverse in terms of both a large black population and a much higher international immigrant population than the national average. I’ve got no dog in this fight. But it strikes me as silly to attribute predominantly racial motivation for moving to these cities. People go there for good jobs and quality of life.

In comparison to the great cities of the Rust Belt, the Northeast, California and Texas, these cities have relatively homogenous populations. Lack of diversity in culture makes it far easier to implement “progressive” policies that cater to populations with similar values; much the same can be seen in such celebrated urban model cultures in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Their relative wealth also leads to a natural adoption of the default strategy of the upscale suburb: the nicest stuff for the people with the most money. It is much more difficult when you have more racially and economically diverse populations with different needs, interests, and desires to reconcile.

Right. And who wants more difficult problems to reconcile?

Even Matt Yglesias finds this argument “slightly odd.” For one thing, he correctly notes that number of blacks isn’t the only measure of diversity. Austin, for example, is less white than the country as a whole, with the diversity mostly added by Hispanics. And Renn goes to great lengths to dismiss foreign immigrants, which most of these cities have in great abundance, as a proper measure of diversity since they tend to be more affluent than inner city blacks.

But to take what I think is the ray of truth here, if you take a place that’s under-invested for decades in walkable urbanism and then create a bit of walkable urbanism the tendency is for that bit to become very expensive. And since African-American households have lower incomes and substantially less wealth than white households, the tendency is for the walkable urban places to become white. But to raise this as an objection to building walkable urbanism is like saying that we shouldn’t try to have great public schools, because poor people might not be able to afford to live near them. That’s totally backwards—the inability of poor people to afford to live in good school districts highlights the need for more good educational opportunities not fewer. By the same token, if investments in walkable urbanism cause prices to shoot up and price people out of the area that shows that we need more walkable urbanism.

Right.  To go further, it’s simply bizarre to criticize people for trying to build desirable communities for themselves simply because some people living elsewhere don’t have it so good.

Beyond that, it’s worth reading recent posts by Andrew Sullivan and others in reaction to Pat Buchanan’s latest article lamenting the loss of white American culture.   The upshot of all of them is that, as Sully puts it, “white Americans do not realize how black they are.”  By which he means how much of our culture is impacted by black culture via what we used to call “the melting pot.”   See Sully here, here, here, here, here, and here.   Also James Poulos.  Ann Althouse disagrees slightly.

“Diversity” is something that’s been advanced as a goal in recent years and which has in turn sparked a counter-diversity push by whites, like Buchanan, who see it as a threat.  It’s a very odd thing in that there’s never been a more diverse culture anywhere.  Not only are we a giant melting pot drawn from all the world’s cultures — even while our common core is Western European — but we’re incredibly heterogeneous.  Life varies from city-to-city, state-to-state, and region-to-region.  And “diversity” means more than “percentage of poor blacks.”

So, it’s more than slightly odd for someone to argue for more diversity by arguing we ought all be more alike.

Heebie-Geebie offers some sage advice on story-telling and blogging:

First, cut way more details than you want to. Cut almost everything. Cut so much that you’re staying ahead of the person listening. Only fill in extra details if they’re still fascinated and you’re going back to flesh out the situation. Second, if your audience isn’t quite captivated, don’t hang on to the point. Blurt it out right at the beginning. If they’re still not captivated, give up. If they do become interested, then fill in the details.

[...]

Blogging is very similar. It’s not about the content of the post, but about not bogging down in boring details.

I was at a blogging seminar with Matt Yglesias a while back and he said the key was to have one idea — and only one idea — per post.  I violate that rule more often than I should.

Ezra Klein enjoys cooking and endorses “Naked Chef” Jamie Oliver’s notion that we’d be a healthier society if we cooked our meals at home rather than eating so much high calorie fare at chain restaurants.  Still, he notes,

The problem is that the evidence suggests meals aren’t driving the rise in obesity — snacks are. A 2003 paper by economists David Cutler, Ed Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro looked at an array of different ways to measure caloric intake, and found that most meals aren’t getting much bigger. Dinner, in fact, might be getting a bit smaller. The big increase in caloric intake actually came between meals. In 1977, Americans reported eating about 186 calories outside of mealtimes. By 1994, that had rocketed to 346 calories. It’s likely even higher now. That difference alone is enough to explain the changes in our national waistline. And it won’t go away if we begin cooking dinners but still are purchasing 20-ounce bottles of Coke at the office.

Matt Yglesias agrees and argues that we should be “cultivating cultural taboos against prepared food,” by which he means prepackaged items ranging from sodas to chips to candy bars to microwave burritos.  But, since we all know that these things are “bad” for us if consumed more than occasionally, that’s going to be hard.  We eat this junk because it’s convenient, tasty, and cheap — not because we think it’s nutritious.

Evidence indicates that you could modestly improve public health and raise a nice chunk of change with a soda tax. Presumably something similar would apply to taxing chips and candy and so forth. You could fund a grapes-promotion program with the money. Or, you know, a robust national network of free clinics at which people could receive basic health care treatment and nutritional advice.

Who is it that isn’t aware that grapes are better for you than Snickers bars and Doritos?  We don’t need a grape-promotion program, we need grapes to be instantly and cheaply available in the same way that chips and candy bars are.   That’s pretty hard to do, given the relative perishability of said items.   And, frankly, people are still likely to prefer a Snickers to a bunch of grapes in between meetings.

Taxes on sodas and snack foods might indeed promote healthier eating.  But only by artificially raising prices and making it harder for poor people to eat what they want.  And it’s not as if they’re going to instead decide to have a boneless chicken breast wrap and some Evian; they’ll just be a little hungrier and less happy. (Snickers, I’m reliably informed, really satisfies.)  The net result will be more misery for the least well off.  And, of course, less freedom.

UPDATE (Dave Schuler)

The work of anthropologists and archaeologists, especially Robert and Linda Braidwood, has increasingly demonstrated that our species has preferentially sought out the food source with the highest level of fat in our environment for, essentially, as long as we’ve been a species. Policies based on changing that in the near term whether through advertising, social pressure, or taxation are doomed to failure. We’re just not built that way.

Update (Steve Verdon):

The thing about this issue that interests me is its connection to the health care debate. I’ve discussed before how using life expectancy as a measure of the efficacy of a countries health care system is a dubious measure. This highlights why. Is obesity bad for health outcomes? Yes. But is it something the medical industry can do much about? No. This is a behavioral issue that impacts things like health outcomes and life expectancy.

Yesterday, somewhere between “tens of thousands” and “two million” people flooded the nation’s capital to protest somethingoranother.

Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government (Jeff Zeleny, NYT)

Amanda Lucidon for The New York Times

A sea of protesters filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall on Saturday in the largest rally against President Obama since he took office, a culmination of a summer-long season of protests that began with opposition to a health care overhaul and grew into a broader dissatisfaction with government.

On a cloudy and cool day, the demonstrators came from all corners of the country, waving American flags and handwritten signs explaining the root of their frustrations. Their anger stretched well beyond the health care legislation moving through Congress, with shouts of support for gun rights, lower taxes and a smaller government.

But as they sang verse after verse of patriotic hymns like “God Bless America,” sharp words of profane and political criticism were aimed at Mr. Obama and Congress.

Dick Armey, a former House Republican leader whose group Freedomworks helped organize the protest, stood before the crowd and led the rallying cries in nearly the same spot where Mr. Obama took his oath of office eight months ago. “He pledged a commitment of fidelity to the United States Constitution,” Mr. Armey said, suggesting that Mr. Obama was in violation of what the founding fathers intended the size and scope of the government to be.

“Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar!” the crowd shouted back, echoing the accusation that Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, hurled at the president three days earlier during his address to Congress.

The demonstrators numbered well into the tens of thousands, though the police declined to estimate the size of the crowd. Many came on their own and were not part of an organization or group. But the magnitude of the rally took the authorities by surprise, with throngs of people streaming from the White House to Capitol Hill for more than three hours.

Lashing Out at the Capitol – Tens of Thousands Protest Obama Initiatives and Government Spending (Emma Brown, James Hohmann and Perry Bacon Jr. – WaPo)

Tens of thousands of conservative protesters, many complaining that the nation is racing toward socialism, massed outside the U.S. Capitol on Saturday, angrily denouncing President Obama’s health-care plan and other initiatives as threats to the Constitution.

The crowd — loud, animated and sprawling — gathered at the West Front of the Capitol after a march along Pennsylvania Avenue NW from Freedom Plaza. Invocations of God and former president Ronald Reagan by an array of speakers drew loud cheers that echoed across the Mall. On a windy, overcast afternoon, hundreds of yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags flapped in the breeze.

“Hell hath no fury like a taxpayer ignored,” declared Andrew Moylan, head of government affairs for the National Taxpayers Union, urging protesters to call their representatives. The demonstrators roared their approval. “We own the dome!” they chanted, pointing at the Capitol.

The demonstrators are part of a loose-knit movement that is galvanizing anti-Obama sentiment across the country, stoking a populist dimension to the Republican Party, which has struggled to find its voice since the 2008 elections.

Tea Party Protesters March on Washington – Thousands March to U.S. Capitol to Protest Government Spending, Health Care; Many Chanted ‘You Lie’ (Russell Goldman, ABC)

Thousands of conservative protesters from across the country converged on the Capitol Saturday morning to demonstrate against President Obama’s proposals for health care reform and voicing opposition to big government, what they say is over-the-top spending.

Carrying signs depicting President Obama as Adolf Hitler and the Joker, and chanting slogans such as “‘No big government” and “Obamacare makes me sick,” approximately 60,000 to 70,000 people flooded Pennsylvania Ave, according to the Washington DC Fire Department.

Organized by FreedomWorks, a conservative activist group led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, many of the protestors were affiliated with the Tea Party movement, grassroots demonstrations that began across the country last spring to protest Democratic tax policies, and government bailouts of the banking and auto industries.

The big blogospheric debate seems to be over crowd size. FreedomWorks apparently quoted ABC News as reporting the crowd size at “1 million to 1.5 million” and others claimed as much as 2 million. ABC issued a report denying that it ever said anything of the sort: “At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as “tens of thousands.” The fact of the matter is that nobody ever has a very good idea how many people attended these things and, since the fiasco of the “Million Man March,” the Capitol Police have wisely stopped providing estimates.

Suffice it to say: A whole lot of people showed up. Michelle Malkin has crowd photos and there’s no refuting that the turnout was simply massive.

What’s more interesting to me is not how many but Why? Matt Yglesias does what pretty much everybody does when there’s a big protest from the other side: Point to the yahoos.

I wouldn’t want to tell you that the majority of the people I saw at this morning’s tea party were such hard-core patriots that they felt the need to walk around waving flags of treason and slavery:

Still it did strike me as noteworthy that your basic tea party crowd isn’t the sort of crowd in which a Confederate flag is unwelcome. I feel like if you’d tried to bring this to a health care rally, folks would have gotten upset. But the tea parties, like a lot of big time conservative events, are a very racism friendly environment. This guy, for example, clearly isn’t so much the type to march with a racist shirt on as he is the kind of guy who’d march with a shirt ridiculing the idea of anti-racism:

As was the case with the bulk of the protesters, there was very little sense that anyone had any actual specific complaint with Obama’s health care proposals. That one woman loves the confederacy. This guy thinks guns are great and diversity is stupid. Many protesters feel that abortion is murder and/or that Barack Obama is in league with terrorists. But nobody had a sign urging the president to adopt more stringent cost control measures, or slamming the concept of regulations to require insurers to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Now, as a Southerner, I tend to have a more benign view of people waving Confederate flags or wearing pro-gun T-shirts. Some of them are racist yahoos, to be sure, but most of them are just decent folks taking pride in a way of life they feel is under assault.

Regardless, however, Matt’s right about the last part:  There’s not one single thing motivating all these people.  They likely have vastly different policy preferences even on the central issue that supposedly ties them together: opposition to Big Government, whose era is not in fact over.  I would simply add that this is true of all mass protest movements.

We on the Right have always made fun of these protestors — which have, until now, been almost exclusively the province of the Left — because, frankly, there are always a lot of yahoos in the crowd.   There are always plenty of signs and t-shirts and epithets shouted that would make the organizers cringe because they take away from the intended message and make the protest seem less serious.  (Matt Welch, who is very sympathetic to the Tea Party cause, points to a man carrying a sign saying “Stop spending our tacos. I love tacos.”  I have no idea what inspired that but it’s epic.)

On the Left, there seem to be a solid cohort who will show up to protest anything; they’re damned near professional protesters.    With the Tea Party protests, we may finally be seeing their analog on the Right.

It’s unfair, regardless of the loose cause that motivates them to show up, to criticize the “movement” because individual protesters seem unable to articulate why they’re there.  Most people really can’t do that.  And people who show up to protest are usually motivated by emotion rather than cold logic.  They’re simply angry at the direction they think they’re country’s going and want to vent their frustrations and show that they’re not alone.  Welch nails it:

Political rallies are no place to seek the subtle truth, nor feel particularly glowing about your countrymen, and today was no different in that regard for me. But the meta-fact about a huge anti-Obamanomics protest eight months into his term is certainly significant, and very little of what I saw made me fear that Alex Pareene will be blown to smithereens by a suicide hijacker from Arkansas.

Malkin’s got my favorite photo:

Not only is the sign defiantly funny — and decidedly not Astroturfed — but it’s a great crowd shot of a bunch of regular Americans getting together to express their displeasure with their government in a civilized manner.  Protest rallies aren’t, so to speak, my cup of tea.  But there are worse outlet valves for the inevitable frustrations of a huge and incredibly diverse country.

Matt Yglesias points to a recent IBM study trying to map much people hate commuting to work and points to this interesting chart:

From this, Matt concludes that all manner of government policies could be framed as a way of reducing the pain of commuting: higher gas taxes, congestion pricing, and so forth.

I simply don’t believe the numbers.   Matt’s commenter Paulie Carbone encapsulates my objection nicely:

I think people are radically overstating how much they dislike traffic. 18% are willing to pay over $30 to save 15 minutes? If you commute to and from work, and work 5 days a week, 50 weeks per year, that’s at least an extra $7,500 per year.

And who really values their time that highly? If you think 15 minutes is worth $30, that’s $120/hour. Would these same people not work for anything less than $120 an hour?

I make a decent living and insisted on the ability to work from home at least one day a week before taking my present job.  I find driving 45 minutes average each way a ridiculous waste of time.  But I wouldn’t pay $120 a day  ($20 x 3 x 2) to avoid it.

The problem with these surveys is that most people are innumerate.  (Which explains, for example, why a significant number of people spend more on child care, commuting costs, lunches, dry cleaning, and the like than they actually net from an unsatisfying job because the family “needs the money.”)

Matt Yglesias takes mock exception to President Obama’s assertion to our nation’s schoolchildren that “You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.” He notes that, “My father dropped out of tenth grade and has had a totally solid career as a novelist and screenwriter.”

Indeed, as several commenters point out, all manner of people drop out of school and wind up having enormously successful careers in business, the arts, and athletics.

Presumably, though, such people are covered by the president’s exhortation.   I’m sure Rafael Yglesias not only learned quite a bit at the elite private schools he attended for nine years but continued to work and train to become successful as a writer.   Certainly, Bill Gates didn’t stop learning after he dropped out of college to found Microsoft.  And even rock stars and athletes have to work and train and learn to excel in their chosen endeavors.

For especially talented and self-motivated people, formal education may actually be a hindrance to achieving their goals, since it at the very least requires divided concentration.  For most, however, that process will expose them to new insights and discipline that will improve their chances at figuring out what they’re good at and making a living doing it.

A debate is raging in the blogosphere about this graph, which shows that “Generally speaking, the wealthier a student’s family is, the higher the SAT score.”

Alex Tabarrok gets us up to speed on the debate thus far:

Greg Mankiw pointed out that the effect is unlikely to be purely causal because there may be an omitted variable bias, IQ for example. Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias both attack Mankiw and point to graphs showing that income matters for college completion and enrollment, respectively, holding various achievement scores constant.  Brad DeLong crunches the numbers on IQ and income correlation to estimate that half the effect is due to IQ and half to something else.

He says this doesn’t tell the whole story, though, “because there are a lot of way that heredity/genes could explain the income/education correlation; IQ is only one possible mechanism, personality (e.g. conscientiousness) is another possibility.”   He points to a longitudinal study of adopted children randomly assigned to parents which found no correlation at all between the income of the adopted parents and their adopted children.

While income didn’t matter, education did:  “Having a college educated mother increases an adoptee’s probability of graduating from college by 7 percentage points, but raises a biological child’s probability of graduating from college by 26 percentage points.”  Further, “The effect for father’s years of education is even larger; about a ten times larger effect on biological children than on adoptees.”

Obviously, this study (which I have not read beyond Tabarrok’s summary) raises other questions.

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, lectures in San Francisco. Justin Sullivan / Getty

General David Petraeus made a funny at the expense of the Air Force in his remarks at the Marine Corps Association Foundation dinner last month:

Come to think of it, in fact another bedrock element of the Marine Corps is unquestionably having the best recruiting ads on television. [Laughter] But this concept is not just an advertisement. The marines’ sense of toughness permeates the Corps’ lore as well as its reality. To recall an illustrative story, a soldier is trudging through the muck in the midst of a downpour with a 60-pound rucksack on his back. This is tough, he thinks to himself. Just ahead of him trudges an Army ranger with an 80-pound pack on his back. This is really tough, he thinks. And ahead of him is a Marine with a 90-pound pack on, and he thinks to himself, I love how tough this is. [laughter, applause] Then, of course, 30,000 feet above them — [laughter] — 30,000 feet above them an Air Force pilot flips aside his ponytail. [laughter, applause] Now — I’m sorry. I don’t know how that got in there — [laughter] — I know they haven’t had ponytails in a year or two — [laughter] — and looks down at them through his cockpit as he flies over. Boy, he radios his wingman, it must be tough down there. [laughter] Well, TV commercials and all joking aside, we’ve all seen that marines truly and consistently live up to their reputation.”

Some ponytailed desk jockey at the Air Force Association got his panties in a bunch, penning an editorial about how these remarks were “Beyond Outrageous.”  Not only does this joke hurt the widdle feewings of our boys in baby blue, “They are symptomatic of the long-held belief of many ground commanders that airpower is no longer, if it ever was, relevant.”

As SFC Hulka so aptly put it, “Lighten up, Francis.”

Matt Yglesias sees this as a “crisis” and foreshadowing a greater problem ahead.  Robert Farley says it shows “a certain insecurity” in the Air Force and Yglesias thinks it exists for good reason.  The service has always operated in relative safety — as Matt says, that’s rather the point of air power — and the increasing use of unmanned drones takes that to the ultimate conclusion.  Naturally, “A service that consists of guys sitting in cubicles playing video games is going to have trouble holding its head high amidst a warrior ethos.”

But most people in the Air Force have been office workers since its inception as a separate service.  Truth be told, most soldiers and sailors do non-trigger-puller jobs, too.  They maintain a warrior ethos by focusing on the team and the larger mission.  And the non-warriors tend to make fun of the warriors on different grounds entirely, as demonstrated from these comments taken from an Air Force website by TIME’s Mark Thompson:

“What an idiot,” one airman fumed on an unofficial Air Force website. “I vote that we should pack our [stuff] and come home. Let the Army march to where they need to go, use artillery for close air support, and medevac on Fed Ex.” A colleague agreed: “As the Big Guy he should be pulling us together, not widening the abyss.” But one contributor claiming to be a more senior officer dissented. “Believe me, if the military is dumb enough to make me a General, you can bet your ass I will be cracking jokes about homo Navy guys, criminal Army types and borderline retarded Marines,” he wrote. “It’s all in good fun, and I think his was, too.” Another poster concurred: “Remember, he is from the service that has to use comic books to teach soldiers how to do periodic maintenance.”

Petraeus’ joke is straight out of the senior officers’ playbook.  (Some more off-color versions are available in Farley’s comment section.) I’ve heard retired Marine General Jim Jones tell similar jokes at the Air Force’s expense with retired USAF Lt.Gen. Brent Scowcroft in the room, to the approving laughter of the latter.  Why?  Because Scowcroft and Jones obviously hold each other in the highest personal and professional esteem and understand that these jokes are told in good fun.  Let some outsider make fun of the Air Force in his presence, though, and Jones would be sure to set them straight.

The warrior culture is similar to that found in a locker room. It uses brutal humor to lighten the tension and test the mettle of one’s fellows.  Airborne troops make fun of dirty nasty legs. Combat arms troops crack jokes about REMFs, the rear-echelon so-and-sos.  The Army disparages the Marines and vice versa.  In the Air Force, it’s pilots and everybody else.  In the Navy, it’s Line and other.  But anyone much above the level of an entering recruit understands that it’s all one big operation.

Nobody appreciates the value of the support team more than a combat infantryman.  They’re utterly dependent on everyone else for sustaining their lives and achieving their mission.  As a rocket artillery officer during Desert Storm, I can assure you that every soldier to a man I talked to was happy for every Navy and Air Force sortie flying over us during the opening weeks of the war.   Yes, we made fun of them because they got to go back to their air conditioned comfort when their mission was over while we were sweating it in the desert heat.  But every bomb dropped or missile fired saved the lives of countless soldiers and marines.

Matt Yglesias notes that bloggers and others who write for the Web lack a luxury of those who write for print: “nobody has any idea who’s reading them.”  Whereas there are detailed metrics about pageviews on the Web, all print has to go on is circulation figures.  So they can blithely assume that their long features and hard news and the like are being widely read, whether it’s true or not.

Some time back, Steve Graham touched some raw nerves by pointing out that:

Most blog traffic is trash. I’ve written about it before, and it’s not exactly news. Everyone knows it. If you look at your stats, you’ll learn that half of your traffic–or a lot more than half–comes from search engines. People type in things like “nipple schoolgirl goat priest molasses,” and they end up at your site for ten seconds, and they leave, hopefully disappointed. Those people aren’t “visitors,” no matter how much you like to think they are. They’re just lost. And they don’t click ads. Even worse, you may be getting traffic because big bloggers link to you. That doesn’t make you a success. It makes you a pet, living on table scraps. When the scraps stop coming–when you say the wrong thing and stop toadying–those tasty scraps can stop coming, instantly, and then you find out how much readers really care about you.

This morning, Henry Copeland pointed out that Huffington Post has changed the display settings on its “Most Popular” widget to hide the fact that much of its traffic comes from salacious junk.

Apparently embarrassed by the importance of sex-driven stories in powering its traffic, Huffpo has recently changed its “most popular stories” feature to obscure how many page impressions each story gets.

The stories now seem to be ranked according to # of comments (see example of the new format at the bottom of the post) but earlier this summer, you could see the number of raw impressions each story was getting.

While serious policy-related “politics” stories, which Huffpo pretends are its bread and butter, got 50k impressions, stories like “When your Boob tape is showing” and “Women’s Iconic Swimsuit movie moments” got millions.

But, alas, that’s what people are interested in.  I’ve written more than 35,000 blog posts over the past six-and-a-half years and gotten a lot of satisfaction from getting traffic and commentary to substantive commentary.  All too frequently, though, those pieces get ignored and crap posts that took ten minutes to write go viral.

A bit over a year ago, Brad DeLong (who is a doctor but not a medical doctor) proposed “An Unrealistic, Impractical, Utopian Plan for Dealing with the Health Care Opportunity,” the crux of which is:

20% Deductible/Out of Pocket Cap: The IRS snarfs 20% of your family economic income. 5% of it is an increase in taxes (but that replaces your and your employer’s current health insurance premiums). 15% of it goes straight into your Health Savings Account. That HSA is then used to pay all your family health bills. If your expenses in a year are less than what’s in your HSA, the balance is rolled into your IRA (or, if you prefer, returned to you with your tax refund check).

Single-Payer for the Rest: If your HSA is emptied and you still have more health bills that year, the federal government pays them. The main point, after all, is insurance: if you fall seriously sick, you want right then and there to be treated whether or not your wallet biopsy is positive.

Sin Taxes: on Tobacco, Gorgonzola, Three-Liter Bottles of Liquid High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Tanning Clinics (Melanoma), et cetera: Sin taxes (and, perhaps, someday general revenues) pay for an army of barefoot doctors and nurses and mobile treatment vans roaming the country, knocking on doors, and providing preventive and other long-run lifestyle services for free: Let me examine your prostate. Mind if I check your refrigerator and tell you how to eat healthier? Have you exercised today? I’m a Pilates instructor, and we could do a session now? Are you up on your immunizations? Anybody here have a fever and need antibiotics? Come on out to the van and I’ll clean your teeth.” The idea is to make the preventive care cheaper-than-free, to insure that nothing with a high long-run benefit/cost ratio gets left undone because people would rather get a bigger check the next April to use to buy an HDTV.

A Lot of Serious Research on Best Public-Health, Chronic-Disease, and Hospital Practices: Made easier, of course, by linking the payment records from the health branch of the IRS to hospital records to the wirelessly-transfered logs from the barefoot doctor vans.

Matt Yglesias summarized it by adding two elements a month ago and E.D. Kain gives it his qualified endorsement this morning on the grounds that “adding health savings accounts (and thus direct, personal involvement) into the mix is a really good idea at containing costs.”

But the cost savings incentive would be rather marginal.  There’s no concern at all for health care costs if Uncle Sugar is going to pay for any excess spending.  That means the only personal incentive is the ability to take deferred savings and put it into one’s retirement account and draw upon it some decades hence.  Given how little we save for own own retirement (beyond that which is forced upon us by FICA taxes) I’m unconvinced that’s a very powerful incentive.

Two blogging conventions, Netroots Nation (the successor to Daily Kos) and RightOnline, are being held in Pittsburgh this week.  As Timothy McNulty reports for the Post-Gazette, they’re different in ways other than politics.

The RightOnline conference starting tomorrow morning at the Sheraton Station Square will have about a quarter of the 2,000 attendees at the liberal conference in the convention center, and only about 20 speakers to the 400 at Netroots. Liberals are throwing multiple parties at the Warhol and a gay-lesbian kiss-in. Conservatives end Friday night with a film criticizing Al Gore.

What, no conservative homosexual kiss-in?! Shocking!

Matt Yglesias says it’s the demographics, stupid:

The over-60 demographic is a hotbed of conservative sentiments, but it’s also very disinclined to go online. The stereotype of progressive bloggers and blog readers as “young” tends to be wildly overstated, but what is true is that the online universe contains relatively few senior citizens, and the current version of the conservative coalition contains quite a lot of seniors.

But conservative bloggers aren’t seniors, so that doesn’t explain it.  Demographics do matter, however. The Netroots do skew younger and their most prominent bloggers tend to have institutional affiliations or be full-time bloggers.  Most of the top conservative bloggers still have day jobs that don’t involve blogging.

An additional explanation is offered in McNulty’s piece:

“The problem by and large remains that on the right, the focus still tends to be on punditry as opposed to activism,” said Erick Erickson, the editor of RedState, and a speaker at RightOnline on Saturday. “It has been focused on bloggers trying to be the next Rush Limbaugh or the next columnist, not on urging readers to call members of Congress or go to tea parties.”

Beyond that, as Chris Bowers and others have argued for years, liberals have tended to be more communal online whereas conservatives have tended to be individualistic.  I, for one, can’t imagine traveling to Pittsburgh to talk about blogging for several days.

Photo by Flickr user Neeta Lind under Creative Commons license.

The Obama Administration is pushing an 8-pronged list of “Health Insurance Consumer Protections.”

No Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions
Insurance companies will be prohibited from refusing you coverage because of your medical history.

No Exorbitant Out-of-Pocket Expenses, Deductibles or Co-Pays
Insurance companies will have to abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses.

No Cost-Sharing for Preventive Care
Insurance companies must fully cover, without charge, regular checkups and tests that help you prevent illness, such as mammograms or eye and foot exams for diabetics.

No Dropping of Coverage for Seriously Ill
Insurance companies will be prohibited from dropping or watering down insurance coverage for those who become seriously ill.

No Gender Discrimination
Insurance companies will be prohibited from charging you more because of your gender.

No Annual or Lifetime Caps on Coverage
Insurance companies will be prevented from placing annual or lifetime caps on the coverage you receive.

Extended Coverage for Young Adults
Children would continue to be eligible for family coverage through the age of 26.

Guaranteed Insurance Renewal
Insurance companies will be required to renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays their premium in full. Insurance companies won’t be allowed to refuse renewal because someone became sick.

Matt Yglesias likes what he sees:  “If you can make it stick, and if you can cash these eight principles out in a reasonable way, this would transform health insurance for the majority of Americans.”

No doubt.  But I’m reminded of Inigo Montoya’s classic observation, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”   In the movie, “that word” was inconceivable.  In this case, it’s insurance.  Typically, we define it along these lines:

A promise of compensation for specific potential future losses in exchange for a periodic payment. Insurance is designed to protect the financial well-being of an individual, company or other entity in the case of unexpected loss.

The whole idea of insurance is that the company collects premiums up front in exchange for assuming possible future risk. Insurance that is required to cover pre-existing conditions really isn’t insurance at all.  If I’m uninsured and wreck my car and go to GEICO to buy a policy, they’re not going to pay for the wreck I already had.  If I die without life insurance, my wife can’t go to MetLife and buy a policy on me and get paid.  Why? Because these loses are no longer potential or in the future; they’ve already happened.

Similarly, insurance companies naturally offer different rates based on projected risk.  Women typically get cheaper auto insurance than men up through a certain age because men are riskier drivers.  Young men get cheaper life insurance than old men.   Smokers pay more for health insurance.

Mandating that certain types of insurance cover reasonable risks in the category is probably good public policy.  Certainly, it’s unconscionable for insurance companies to take your money during the good times and then drop you once you’ve become ill or old, as any potential alternatives are going to charge based on your new status.

Further, I think it’s a good idea for health and dental insurance to cover routine preventative care to forestall emergency care down the road.  But plans which do that should be allowed to charge accordingly.  After all, they’ve got no guarantee that you’ll be a customer in the long term and that they’ll therefore amortize the investment.

And why shouldn’t people have the right to buy a cheaper, no-frills plan rather than having an expensive, Cadillac plan as the entry level option?  Doesn’t that actually exacerbate the problem of the uninsured?

Update (Steve Verdon): In addition to James’ point that what these “reform” measures seek to create is not insurance (Arnold Kling uses the term insulation, as in insualtion from costs), several of these items are at cross purposes. For example,

No Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions
Insurance companies will be prohibited from refusing you coverage because of your medical history.

No Exorbitant Out-of-Pocket Expenses, Deductibles or Co-Pays
Insurance companies will have to abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses.

No Cost-Sharing for Preventive Care
Insurance companies must fully cover, without charge, regular checkups and tests that help you prevent illness, such as mammograms or eye and foot exams for diabetics.

As James noted, when there is a pre-existing condition what we are talking about is not insurance. Instead we are talking about paying for someone’s total health care expenditures. To use the language of insurance the premium is equal to the total cost of treatement. Since this would be exorbitant, everyone elses premium has to go up which is cost sharing, and depending on the costs possibly leading to exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, deductible or co-pays.

Then there is this part,

No Gender Discrimination
Insurance companies will be prohibited from charging you more because of your gender.

What if women do cost more? After all they do do one thing men don’t: have babies. If they are paying the same rate as men, then it must be that men’s premiums are higher…thus cost-sharing.

Basically, this is just a continuation of the same old things that have been playing a role in getting us to the position we are in. Cover everything and anything, and don’t let insurance companies charge the correct prices. Insurance companies can screen for people with pre-existing conditions, they have small armies of actuaries who can tell who cost how much on an expected basis. The reason we have some of the problems we do is that people’s health care choices are often divorced from the costs associated with them. For example, in the Netherlands and Switzerland people have to buy their own insurance (in the Netherlands there is partial payment from employers). Could this out-of-pocket expense help people select policies that are more suited to their actual situation than that cover a huge assortment of services and benefits they might not want? The problem with people like Matthew Yglesias is that they are operating under the misapprehension that “yes, we can” grow the world’s food supply in a flower pot.

Matt Yglesias notes that Shanghai has a long-term plan for expanding their subway system and laments that we’re not so forward thinking here in America.

What’s striking is the extent to which we don’t operate like that here in the United States. I think everyone believes that over the next couple of decades the Washington, DC metro area will continue to add population. And people likewise clearly envision there being additional square feet of office space in the District and they’re also envision an increase in the District’s population. On top of that, we’re also trying to envision a less carbon-intensive future. All this pretty clearly implies that there ought to be some sort of plan in place for building additional Metro capacity through the central city.

My initial reaction was that, yeah, authoritarian states run by Communist parties tend to be better than democracies at producing long-term plans. After all, it’s easier to plan if you are going to be in office for the foreseeable future and don’t have to worry about public reaction to your policies.

Amusingly, however, his commenters have already pointed out that:

• The Census Bureau [Excel spreadsheet] actually predicts a significant decline in DC’s population over the next two decades.

• U.S. metropolitan areas with subway systems, including DC, in fact have plans locatable in seconds via the Internet.  LA.  NYC.  DC. Seattle.

As I understand it, you can also get good Chinese food in those cities.

Matt Yglesias cites a 15-year-old essay by Hendrick Hertzberg arguing that the filibuster is unconstitutional:

It’s true that the framers did not specify that the Senate would do its normal business by simple majority vote, but that’s because it didn’t occur to them that they had to specify it, any more than it occurred to them to specify that senators should not dunk each other’s powdered wigs in the inkwells. For, as the Supreme Court noted in 1892, “the general rule of all parliamentary bodies” that “when a majority is present, the act of a majority of the quorum is the act of the body…has been the rule for all time.”…. Unfortunately, the Court, which is extremely shy of challenging the internal workings of Congress, is not about to outlaw filibusters.

Matt tends to agree but 1) thinks it’s a good thing that the courts are reluctant to weigh in here; 2)the Senate could fix this if it’s Members wanted to; and 3) it’s members don’t want to because “most senators care more about their personal power and prerogatives than they do about the welfare of the country or the world.”

While I think the widespread use of the filibuster and other supermajority requirements like the Byrd Rule are extraconstitutional, they’re rather clearly not unconstitutional. Why?  Because Article I, Section 5, Clause 2 specifies that “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings.”  So long as the rules don’t violate other provisions on the Constitution, then, the Senate can run itself however it damn well pleases.  And it does!

UPDATE: Commenter TG Chicago writes, “I’d also be interested to know what you think of the good of the filibuster rather than just the legality of it.”  I’ve written pretty extensively on the topic in the past but most people reading this post likely haven’t read those old posts.

Short answer: I think it’s a good thing if used for truly huge legislation that will have a major impact on the way we govern ourselves and a bad thing if it’s used routinely on even basic legislation.  So, for example, filibustering a total overhaul of the health care system or a $1.3 trillion bailout is fair game but filibustering, say, Cash for Clunkers is not.

Additionally, I disagree with the use of the filibuster on presidential prerogatives, such as judicial and cabinet appointments, where the Senate’s intended role is merely advisory.  With legislation, Congress is the lead actor with a presidential signature as an institutional check.  For appointments, the president is the lead actor with the Senate there to prevent clearly unqualified nominees from getting through.

Continuing a long-running theme at his blog, Matt Yglesias laments that Senators from small states wield so much power.  The latest fuel is a NYT feature on six moderates who are supposedly the linchpins to putting together a bipartisan health care deal and who routinely hash out the details of same over snacks.

[V]ast power is being wielded by people who, in a democratic system of government, would have almost no power. We’re talking, after all, about Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Collectively those six states contain about 2.74 percent of the population, less than New Jersey, or about one fifth the population of California.

There’s no doubt that the small states have disproportionate power in a system wherein all states get equal voting power.  Then again, that was the whole point (see: Compromise, Great).

Would we design the system this way if we were starting from scratch?  Probably not.  But it made good sense at a time when the several states were sovereign entities banded together for national defense and international commerce.

Does this make our system undemocratic?  Not any moreso than, say, the fact that five unelected people on the Supreme Court (about 0.00 percent of the population!) can overrule an act of the legislature.  Or that it requires a supermajority to amend the Constitution or ratify a treaty.

Matt is also frustrated that the above-mentioned six come from predominately rural states and therefore ignore the interests of urbanites.  But that’s just a function of self-selection in a particular instance.  It’s certainly conceivable that a group of Senators from larger states who happen to be on the fence on some other issue could dine together regularly and use their informal gatherings to work out their policy positions.